Rambling thoughts about recent events in MariaDB / MySQL or Free software/Open source
Lately there has been a lot of discussion about “hard” or “soft” forks related to MySQL. As someone who has done a successful fork of MySQL, I think this is both confusing and trivialising the concept of forking. In my previous blog , I did touch a bit on this topic, but it looks like some more clarifications are needed. When we did the initial fork of MariaDB from MySQL, we tried our best to keep…
It is 15 years since the first MariaDB server release of MariaDB 5.1.38 on 29'th of October 2009. MariaDB got its name from my youngest daughter Maria, following the tradition of MySQL, who got its name from my oldest daughter My. The MariaDB project started on April 20 2009, the same day when Oracle announced that Oracle will buy Sun Microsystems, who owned MySQL. The initial MariaDB engineering…
MariaDB 11.0-Alpha preview is now available for download ! MariaDB 11.0 is in essence a "new optimizer cost model" release. There are also some other features , but I will concentrate this blog post on the 11.0 optimizer changes. Why/when is MariaDB 11.0 of interest to you? MariaDB 11.0 should be of interest to you if any of the following scenarios match your typical queries: Your queries are…
Yesterday was a big day for me and everyone involved in MariaDB when MariaDB Corporation (Now MariaDB plc) was listed on the New York Stock Exchange ! (NYSE:MRDB) This has been a long journey, starting from the exodus of MySQL developers from Sun Microsystems to Monty Program in 2009 as part of the announcement of Oracle acquiring Sun. One year later, there was a second exodus of MySQL personal…
Hello world, I am still alive (even if this blog hasn't been that much alive lately)! There have been way too long since my last blog, so I thought it's time to remedy that and write some updates about what I have been doing with MariaDB lately I am a believer in easy upgrades (this is why we do our best in MariaDB to not removed old syntax, features or variables). This is why I designed MariaDB…
Last week, Oracle announced the general availability of MySQL 8.0. This is good news for database users, as it means Oracle is still developing MySQL. I decide to celebrate the event by doing a quick test of MySQL 8.0. Here follows a step-by-step description of my first experience with MySQL 8.0. Note that I did the following without reading the release notes, as is what I have done with every…
MariaDB 10.2.6 GA is now released . It's a release where we have concentrated on adding new advanced features to MariaDB The most noteworthy ones are: Windows Functions gives you the ability to do advanced calculation over a sliding window. Common table expressions allows you to do more complex SQL statements without having to do explicit temporary tables. We finally have a DEFAULT clause that can…
While most of the MariaDB developers have been working hard on getting MariaDB 10.2 out as GA, a small team, including me, has been working on the next release, MariaDB 10.3 . The theme of MariaDB 10.2 is complex operations, like window functions , common table expressions , JSON functions , the theme of MariaDB 10.3 is compatibility. Compatibility refers to functionality that exist in other…
I believe that Open Source is one of the best ways to develop software. However, as I have written in blogs before , the Open Source model presents challenges to creating a software company that has the needed resources to continually invest in product development and innovation. One reason for this is a lack of understanding of the costs associated with developing and extending software. As one…
This is a repost of Otto Kekäläinen's blog of the MariaDB foundations work in 2015 . The mariadb.org website had over one million page views in 2015, a growth of about 9% since 2014. Good growth has been visible all over the MariaDB ecosystem and we can conclude that 2015 was a successful year for MariaDB. Increased adoption MariaDB was included for the first time in an official Debian release…
2014 was a productive year for the MariaDB Foundation. Here is a list of some of the things MariaDB Foundation employees have accomplished during 2014: The 3 full-time MariaDB Foundation developers have worked hard to make MariaDB better: Some 260 commits Some 25 reviews of code from the MariaDB community. Fixed some 170 bugs and new features. For a full list, please check Jira . Reported some 160…
We have now published the trademark agreement between the MariaDB Corporation (formerly SkySQL) and the MariaDB Foundation . This agreement guarantees that MariaDB Foundation has the rights needed to protect the MariaDB server project! With this protection, I mean to ensure that the MariaDB Foundation in turn ensures that anyone can be part of MariaDB development on equal terms (like with any…
Today SkySQL is changing its name to MariaDB Corporation . This is something that I had both anticipated and I think it's a great step for MariaDB . I wanted here to to share my thoughts on how this change affects the MariaDB community. The short version: As the MariaDB Corporation is the main driving force behind the development of the MariaDB server and the biggest support provider for it, it…
While working on some new features in MariaDB 10.1, I noticed that a normal user couldn't disable the slow query log, which I thought was a bit silly. While implementing and documenting this feature, I noticed that the information about the different logs is quite spread around and it's not that trivial to find out how to enable/disable the different logs. To solve this, I created a new MariaDB kb…
With MariaDB and MySQL we have always taken security seriously . In MariaDB 10.0 we added roles to make it easier to administrate many users. MariaDB and MySQL has also many different encryption functions , but what has been neglected in the past is to make encryption easy to use. This is now about to change. I recently had a meeting with Elmar Eperiesi-Beck from eperi about simplifying the usage…
It's now 3 weeks since the MariaDB & MySQL community day in Santa Clara . Thanks everyone for coming! Personally I think it was a success, especially considering the short time we had to put it together! 11 great speakers and 100+ participants. We had a small issue with the camera that we used to record all talks: The slides are not very visible. We have been working on editing the videos for all…
We have now a great set of talks for the MariaDB & MySQL community event in Santa Clara on 3rd of April! You can find the current scheduled talks here . Initially we had a few additional talks by other community members, who however had to cancel because of contractual reasons with Percona Live. We can still fit in a few extra talks by adjusting the schedule. If you want to present something that…
I am happy to announce that the MariaDB Foundation is organising a MariaDB & MySQL community event in Santa Clara on Thursday the 3rd of April. The venue is the Hilton Santa Clara hotel , a short walk from the Percona Live 2014 event. The community event is hosted by the MariaDB Foundation with support from AccelerationDB . This is a free community event to complement the Percona Live event. The…
I just pushed the new CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE syntax into MariaDB 10.0, for the soon to be released 10.0.8-gamma (RC). (Before we had only CREATE OR REPLACE for views) When using the new syntax, the CREATE statement will automatically DROP the old table if it existed. This is the last feature (which is also a bug fix) depending on me that needed to be pushed before we could release 10.0 gamma…
I recently read some comments that we at the MariaDB Foundation have not been very open about what we are doing. We are very sorry about this. The problem is not that we are secret about what we are doing, the problem is that not many of us working at the MariaDB Foundation are very active bloggers. I will try to address this concern by starting a monthly blog about the MariaDB development that…
Froscon , the German Free Software and Open Source conference, is happening again this weekend in University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg . This year we have a MariaDB /MySQL room, C 217, where we can meet, discuss and present MariaDB and MySQL related issues. I will probably be in the room or at the MariaDB booth most of the time. I welcome people to come to the room with their database…
A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed on ZDNET about how to create successful software company in todays world. I assume that because the original article also mentioned my other project, MariaDB , some people jumped to the wrong conclusion about my intentions or what I was trying to achieve. For those that want to know more about Business Source, there is now an academic article in TIM…
The MariaDB Foundation have just issued press release about the new Governance in the Foundation. A lot of the new things that is happening in the MariaDB adoption comes thanks to the work we have done in the Foundation. The Foundation is also happy to announce that is has now 2 senior MySQL (now MariaDB) developers on board, Alexander Barkov and Sergey Vojtovich and a documentation writer, Ian…
It's now about one year ago since we released MariaDB 5.5 . That proved to be an important release for MariaDB as it became popular with the users and ultimately also has been adopted by several important Linux distributions. But we have not stopped working since then, and now the MariaDB project is happy to announce something new again: the immediate availability of MariaDB Galera Cluster 5.5.29…
An old Chinese curse says " May you live in interesting times ". Fortunately this can be taken both as a curse or as a blessing. For MariaDB this has definitely been a blessing the last few months. Since we announced the MariaDB foundation in December 2012 a lot has happened: Wikipedia is moving to MariaDB . Mozilla is also now using MariaDB . Fedora and OpenSuse is replacing MySQL with MariaDB in…