The  MariaDB Foundation announcement spawned some interesting commentary about the state of open source databases.  One recent headline cited the "beleaguered MySQL community." Beleaguered is a delightful adjective.  The OED tells us that it means beset, invested, or besieged.  Much as I like the word, I do not think it is an accurate or useful description of the MySQL community.  This article and others like it miss the point of what is happening to MySQL and its users.

Let's start by disproving that the notion that the MySQL community is beleaguered.  I don't …

Galera from codership has been getting a lot of attention recently. Galera provides a nice High Availability solution for MySQL where Galera provides synchronous replication with conflict detection using the classic InnoDB Storage Engine. No more playing about with special storage engines of DRBD failover, just continue to use InnoDB and add Galera as the secret sauce for High Availability.

Some of the neat features of Galera are, but are not limited to, multi-master replication, a lightweight implementation of replication and zero failover times due to the multi.master ability. This is not a complete HA solution though, just a component of it, we still need to add some monitoring and failover mechanisms, but as Galera is multi-master this is greatly simplified and can in many cases be handled by the driver or the application with little overhead.

Now, the replication in Galera is synchronous, so that should slow …

She hired the 400+ original MySQLers … and sets out to hire the SkySQLers of tomorrow! Boel Larsen blogs about open positions & life at SkySQL - and wants you to join the fun!

Those of you who know me also know that I spent over six years working for MySQL HR (for another couple of years I stayed on with Sun).  I joined as employee thirty-something, so running HR meant that I was more or less involved with hiring all of the 400 or so employees who joined after me. I knew pretty much everyone by name.

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What is the value of a seed? 
When I discussed the MariaDB Foundation with friends and colleagues, many said I was exaggerating. My believe is that the Foundation is important for MySQL and for the future of the IT industry - services and applications. Many agreed with me that the Foundation is important for the MySQL ecosystem, but involving the global economy and the whole IT industry is a bit of a stretch.

Fact is, the World Wide Web would not be as it is today without MySQL. MySQL was part of the LAMP stack. It powered - and still powers - some of the most successful web sites in the world. Without LAMP, companies like Facebook, Twitter or Google would have been developed in a completely different way or they would have not been developed at all.

The importance of MySQL for the Internet is pretty clear for many of us. What is perhaps less clear is what is the current situation of MySQL and the …

LGPL release of MariaDB connectors opens up new possibilities for application developers

As I said last month, SkySQL has the goal of being THE provider of valuable, performance-enhancing and revenue-generating solutions for the 15 million users of open source MySQL and MariaDB databases in enterprise and cloud computing. 

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You may have already seen the announcement MariaDB Foundation to Safeguard Leading Open Source Database. We at Open Query wholeheartedly support this (r)evolution of the MySQL ecosystem, which appears to be increasingly necessary as Oracle Corp is seriously dropping the ball with security updates and actually just general development and innovation. Oracle has actually done some very good work, I happily acknowledge that – but security issues are critical, having crashing bugs and incorrect query results in a .28 of a GA release is uncool, and not incorporating awesome development efforts by the community is just astonishing.

MariaDB is where the Sphinx fulltext …

• Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius, David Axmark, and Allan Larsson announce MariaDB Foundation
• Leading organizations pledge EUR1M to launch not-for-profit organization
• Further sponsors sought; Board elections to be held February 2013

Percona Live Conference, London – December 4, 2012 –The founders of the most popular databases on the web, Michael Widenius, David Axmark, and Allan Larsson today announced the formation of the MariaDB Foundation. “MariaDB continues the project started 18 years ago when we founded MySQL, with code maintained by the same dedicated core team. The time is right for an independent organisation to to safeguard the interests of MariaDB users and developers as we head towards MariaDB 10” said David Axmark.

“The MariaDB Foundation has the potential to become a new beacon for the MySQL ecosystem. SkySQL is …

2nd release of SkySQL™ Cloud Data Suite provides users with customisation capabilities for free cloud database deployments Update release: SkySQL™ Cloud Data Suite

SkySQL™ Cloud Data Suite is a collection of software components that provides a highly available database solution in a cloud environment based on MariaDB and 100% compatible with the MySQL database. It includes the following features:

• An automatic configurator
• An administrative console with ...
  • A graphical backup and recovery manager
  • The ability to deploy each instance securely within the user’s environment
  • Feature-rich, web-based query tools
  • An advanced monitoring tool
• A full set of HA solutions (synchronous and asynchronous)

…

Important Security Fix for a Buffer Overflow Bug: MariaDB 5.5.28a, 5.3.11, 5.2.13 and 5.1.66 include a fix for CVE-2012-5579, a vulnerability that allowed an authenticated user to crash MariaDB server or to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the mysqld process. This is a serious security issue. We recommend upgrading from older versions as soon as possible.

MariaDB 5.5.28a, 5.3.11, 5.2.13 and 5.1.66 (GA) binaries, packages, and source tarballs are now available for download from http://downloads.mariadb.org. So you can upgrade within your own major series.

Note that while this fix has just been published, some other vulnerabilities have been noted over the weekend also. Below a summary of these other CVEs as documented by Red Hat Security Response Team, with annotations by Sergei Gulubchik who is the Security Coordinator for MariaDB.

• …

Finally there is an LGPL C client library for MariaDB, and thus also for MySQL. Monty Program and SkySQL have been working on this for some time. Admittedly there was already the BSD licensed Drizzle client library which was also able to talk to a MySQL/MariaDB server, however its API is different. The C client library for MariaDB has exactly the same API existing applications are used to, so you can just re-link and keep going! There is also a new LGPL Java client library for MariaDB.

In case you don’t quite realise: this is actually a major thing.

At MySQL AB, the client library was made GPL and this flowed through to Sun Microsystems and then Oracle Corp. This licensing choice for the client library was the basis of the …