After a conference, when I take stock of what I have learned, I usually realise that the best achievements are the result of interacting with other attendees during the breaks, rather than simply listening to the lectures. It might be because I follow closely the blogosphere and thus the lectures have few surprises in store for me, or perhaps because many geeks take the conference as an excuse to refresh dormant friendships, catch up with technical gossip, and ask their friends some questions that were too sensitive to be discussed over Twitter and have been waiting for a chance of an in-person meeting to see the light of the day.

I surely had some of such questions, and I took advantage of the conference to ask them. As it often happens, I got satisfactory …

While automatic filling of HTTP basic auth credentials works fine on the Mac, I have had significant trouble getting it to work on iOS devices. This is especially unfortunate, because while on the road I sometimes need to have a look at monitoring systems that have HTTP basic authentication enabled and that use long complex passwords. Should be easy with iCloud keychain, right? Yeah...

Opening the respective site in iOS Safari pops up the basic auth credentials dialog. It also shows the little key icon in the keyboard toolbar which gives access to iCloud keychain entries. However, while on the Mac the username and password fields are correctly populated, on iOS you cannot even see the respective entry.

Turns out, and I assume this is a bug in iOS Safari, the type of keychain entries shown is limited to "Web form password". Safari on the Mac stores the entry as "Internet Password" though, as can be seen in the Keychain Access …

The following sessions were held on the two presentation days of the MariaDB Developers Unconference in Shenzhen. Day 1 MariaDB in 2017 (Otto Kekäläinen) What’s in the pipeline for 10.3 and beyond (Monty) – Slides AliSQL Roadmap (Xiao Bin) JSON support in MariaDB (Vicențiu Ciorbaru) – Slides Replication (Lixun Peng) Encryption key management (Ben) InnoDB […]

The post Presentations from the 2017 MariaDB Developers Unconference in Shenzhen appeared first on MariaDB.org.

The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

One of the goals of the MariaDB Foundation is to help new contributors understand the source code and to lower the barrier for new participants. One way to measure this is to look at the number of pull requests received and accepted, as these mostly reflect community contributions. The figures below are for the main […]

The post Community contributions to MariaDB appeared first on MariaDB.org.

The hashicorp/raft library is a Go library to provide consensus via Raft protocol implementation. It is the underlying library behind Hashicorp's Consul.

I've had the opportunity to work with this library a couple projects, namely freno and orchestrator. Here are a few observations on working with this library:

• TL;DR on Raft: a group communication protocol; multiple nodes communicate, elect a leader. A leader leads a consensus (any subgroup of more than half the nodes of the original group, or hopefully all of them). Nodes may leave and rejoin, and will remain consistent with consensus.
• The hashicorp/raft library is an implementation of …

My first encounter with the gdb command duel was on some old IRIX about 15 years ago. I immediately loved how convenient it was for displaying various data structures during MySQL debugging, and I wished Linux had something similar. Later I found out that Duel was not something IRIX specific, but a public domain patch […]

The post Duel: gdb vs. linked lists, trees, and hash tables appeared first on MariaDB.org.

Anyone who has peeked inside a gdb manual knows that gdb has some kind of Python API. And anyone who has skimmed through has seen something called “Pretty Printing” that supposedly tells gdb how to print complex data structures in a nice and readable way. Well, at least I have seen that, but I’ve never […]

The post Making life prettier with gdb PrettyPrinting API appeared first on MariaDB.org.

MySQL 3.20 to 4.0 In the good old days, when 32MB of RAM justified the name my-huge.cnf, when nobody knew Google and Facebook didn’t even exist, security was… how do I put it… kind of cute. Computer viruses didn’t steal millions and didn’t disrupt elections — they played Yankee Doodle or told you not to […]

The post Who are you? The history of MySQL and MariaDB authentication protocols from 1997 to 2017 appeared first on MariaDB.org.

In this blog we’ll look at the results from Percona’s blog poll on what programming languages you’re using for backend development.

Late last year we started a poll on what backend programming languages are being used by the open source community. The three components of the backend – server, application, and database – are what makes a website or application work. Below are the results of Percona’s poll on backend programming languages in use by the community:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

One of the best-known and earliest web service stacks is the LAMP stack, which spelled out refers to Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python. We can see that this early model is still popular when it comes to the backend.