Parts of the world are already celebrating Christmas Eve and it’s time to relax and spend time with family and friends. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas this is when there is time for less work. Here are a few words to round off MariaDB’s current state and where it’s heading.

This year culminated in MariaDB 5.3.3, the release candidate of 5.3. This is a significant release that makes years of work available by default in the database server. Earlier releases still required features to be explicitly switched on, but thanks to thorough testing assuring the quality of the new functionality we have now enabled them. It’s still called a release candidate which means it’s ready for general usage, but we want more user feedback before calling it stable. Make yourself familiar with the MariaDB 5.3.3 release notes.

Most of the new features and …

We have lately been talking about some upcoming features that we feel are important to MariaDB users, because the corresponding ones that will be provided with MySQL will be incompatible with MariaDB and closed source.

We’re happy to announce the following:

• The next version of MariaDB, version 5.2.10 will include an open source PAM Authentication Plugin. MariaDB 5.2.10 is scheduled for release next week.
• A Windows Authentication Plugin is in development and QA currently and will be part of MariaDB 5.2.11, which is scheduled for release before Christmas.
• MariaDB 5.5 will include both of the above plugins and an open source thread pool implementation. The soon-to-be-launched first version however will not include the thread pool.

Stay tuned for more information as soon as we start …

I just finished reading a couple of interesting, and somewhat related, blog posts which I think are worth sharing (apologies to anyone who has already seen them). One is from Jelastic and the other is from Michal Hrušecký.

I’ve written about MariaDB and the Jelastic cloud before (see MariaDB now available as a hosted database via Jelastic cloud platform). Now Jelastic has published statistics on the relative popularity of the various databases they offer. The good news is MariaDB is currently the database of choice for 14% of their customers. The bad news is that we’re in fourth place behind their other three database choices (MySQL, …

The Caryatids on the south porch of the Erechtheion (420 BC), Athens, Greece

I suppose I should probably say “MariaDB στην Ελλάδα” which, according to Google Translate, is Greek for “MariaDB in Greece”. We’re still finalizing the arrangements, but I’m pleased to announce that the next Monty Program-sponsored MariaDB Developer Meeting will be held in (or near) Athens, Greece. Update: See below for hotel/location information.

Monty Program tries to hold two MariaDB Developer Conferences / Monty Program company meetings each year. The most recent one was held in Portugal this past March and it’s past time for another one. Monty Program is a virtual company with employees scattered all around the world, and these meetings give us a chance to both get together with each other and to …

One thing which we, as developers of MariaDB, run into is that our personal database needs are not the same as many of our users. In fact, our needs are quite light compared to many. We have a MariaDB website, a company website, a knowledgebase, this blog, and that’s about it. None of them are particularly high traffic compared to what our customers have. But apart from talking to our customers, which are just a small percentage of the total MariaDB population, we wanted to have a way of finding out how MariaDB is used “in the real world”, so to speak.

Asking lots and lots of people to fill out surveys isn’t any fun, and we would have to keep repeating the survey ad nauseum to get useful information over time on trends and such. …

I just updated to Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric” on one of my desktops and I ran into an issue with MariaDB.

It’s not an issue with MariaDB itself, more in how the MariaDB “Natty” .deb packages are configured. We haven’t released .deb packages for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric”, but the Natty packages work fine, apart from this one configuration issue (and when we do release “Oneiric” packages, they will work out-of-the-box).

The main problem is that some things have moved around in “Oneiric” and Apparmor doesn’t like the MariaDB “Natty” Apparmor defaults file because it doesn’t account for some of the new destinations. Specifically, /var/run has been moved to /run (a discussion of the rationale behind the move can be found here). Other things have been moved too, but the /var/run to /run move is the one that is …

Along with many of my colleages, and many excellent community speakers, I will also be presenting at Oracle OpenWorld this year!

I’ll be giving two talks:

Getting to Know MySQL Enterprise Monitor – Tuesday, 10:15 AM, Marriott Marquis – Golden Gate C1

MySQL Enterprise Monitor is the monitoring and management solution for DBAs and developers delivered as part of MySQL Enterprise Edition. It provides background monitoring, alerting, trending, and analysis of the MySQL database and the statement traffic that is running within it.

Come to this session to learn how to install/configure, customize, and use MySQL Enterprise Monitor to suit your environment. …

One could say that MariaDB now is 2 years old as a packaged product. The latest version, MariaDB 5.3 Beta, is the culmination of many years of hard work. We believe it contains the largest and most significant change to the code of MySQL since the launch of MySQL 5.0. I’m talking about the changes made to the central product component called the Optimizer.

Why did we touch something so central to the product? The fast answer is that the original Optimizer is about 17 years old. Prior to the work we did for MariaDB 5.3, the Optimizer hadn’t had any huge evolutionary improvements or changes in a decade (except for some features that were added in 2003-2005). It was missing basic functionality that one can expect in any 2010s relational database. Things like hash joins or efficient handling of subqueries.

We’ve also wanted to gradually make MariaDB better at handling bigger tables and bigger queries. This requires query plans to …

Posted recently on the maria-developers mailing list, by Igor Babaev, Principal MariaDB developer at Monty Program is some interesting preliminary results for MariaDB 5.3.0 benchmarked against the DBT-3 benchmarking program.

DBT-3 is a benchmark to test a decision support workload, with a suite of business-oriented queries and concurrent data modifications.

Read Igor’s discoveries, which he ran on a laptop with 4 cores (multi-threaded = 8 cores in total), 8GB RAM and SSD on SuSE, and as Igor says, enjoy his numbers. It is a repeatable benchmark with all settings included. We’d like to see discussion continued on the mailing list!

Resources

Anil Gaur, VP of Java EE Platform and GlassFish, gave a presentation on "Oracle GlassFish Server: A flexibly, light-weight, and production-ready Java EE 6". There were about 100 attendees in the …