September 1, 2010
analog
2 Comments
I was saddened to hear news today of the passing of Ian Clatworthy. Although I did not know Ian well, he was a great co-worker during my time at Canonical. Ian was fun, passionate, easygoing, affable and tolerant. He was also a great coder, and always ready to dive into bzr source to scratch user itches.
We all need to process news like this in our own ways, and sometimes just a good emotional release is in order. In all seriousness, today I remarked in #bzr
[mneptok] TODO: tonight when the moon is high in the sky, go and let loose a prolonged howl. think of igc.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I got a few “+1″ sentiments. And that got me thinking …
Please do step outside in the darkness and give a howl at the moon for Ian. Especially if you’re an Ubuntu member with a blog syndicated to Planet Ubuntu. Then, write a blog post with just “Ian Howl +1!” as the content. Hopefully, together we can get Planet Ubuntu showing nothing but oddball Free Software people howling at the moon in tribute to a fallen comrade.
I didn’t know Ian well enough to say, “Ian would have wanted this,” but I did know him well enough to know he’d get a mighty big grin out of the idea.
So, without further ado …
Ian Howl +1!
July 20, 2010
digital
10 Comments
After two months of submissions, Monty Program employee review, community voting and Monty’s final decision, we are happy to announce that the Maria storage engine will henceforth be known as …
Aria!
Congratulations to Chris Tooley who suggested the name. Chris said about Aria in his submission, “Maria without the ‘M’, plus aria is a pleasant musical term.” Chris is now the proud new owner of a System 76 Meerkat net-top computer. Thanks to our good friends at System76 for providing this nifty prize.
Hopefully, in time, “Aria” will also be a pleasing database engine term. And now we will not have the confusion between MariaDB and Maria.
July 16, 2010
digital
1 Comment
Later today I head off to PDX to attend OSCon and the Community Leadership Summit. Will you be there? If so, and you’re a GNOMEist, Ubuntu user or especially if you’re involved with MySQL or MariaDB, find me!
If you’re at OSCon and have any interest in databases, be sure to attend the MariaDB Bof. Yes, yes … we’ll have black vodka.
July 10, 2010
digital
1 Comment
We have now closed the online survey for the Rename Maria contest. Thanks to everyone that participated, the voting exceeded our expectations!
We will now present the top five candidates to Monty for his final vote, and we’ll announce the winner on Monday, July 19, coinciding with the first day of OSCon.
Stay tuned to find out the new name of the Maria storage engine, and who won the Meerkat net-top!
July 5, 2010
digital
5 Comments
Just over a month ago Monty Program announced a contest to rename the Maria storage engine. We had a LOT of submissions, probably due in part to the fact the winner of the contest gets a shiny new Meerkat net-top computer from System76.
Phase 1 was getting the community to give us submissions. During Phase 2, the submissions were collected and voted upon by the Monty Program employees. This reduced the hundreds of submissions to a manageable fifteen choices. Phase 3 is now upon us, where we ask the community to go and choose their favorite ideas from the fifteen semi-finalists. The top five results will then be submitted to Monty for a final vote during the fourth and final phase.
You can click here to take survey. The survey will be closed at 23:59 UTC this coming Friday, July 9. We plan to announce the winner on the first day of O’Reilly’s OSCon event on July 19.
So, what are you waiting for? Go vote for a new name!
July 1, 2010
digital
1 Comment
The Community Leadership Summit 2010 is July 17 and 18, just before OSCon. Monty Program is proud to again sponsor this important event, and I’ll be there along with Monty and Colin Charles.
It was a great event last year, and there’s no reason to believe this year will be any different. It’s free to attend, so if you’re going to OSCon, live in PDX, or are involved with building a community you have no excuse for not being there.
Well, you’ll have to listen to Jono, so I guess there is a price to pay. But it’s nothing years of therapy and a trans-orbital lobotomy can’t fix …
I tease. I tease because I love.
June 14, 2010
digital
1 Comment
I’ll be going to DebConf 10 in New York City in early August! I’d love to hear from SQL/NoSQL users, package maintainers, developers, etc that also plan to attend. Black vodka BOF, anyone?
May 21, 2010
digital
4 Comments
Since we started work on MariaDB, the drop in replacement for MySQL, there has been a LOT of confusion about MariaDB the database versus Maria the storage engine.
Thus, Monty Program is running a “Rename Maria” contest. Click that shiny, beckoning link for more information.
As an incentive to click that link, the prize is a spiffy Meerkat NetTop computer from our friends at System76!
The contest runs through May 31, so jump-start that clever brain of yours and send in your suggestions!
May 21, 2010
digital
Comments Off
Here’s a somewhat shorter post than the last just to give an update on what’s been happening at Monty Program.
As I said in a previous post, we had a company meeting in Reykjavik in late February. Fortunately, geological hiccups only started after we left.
About a month later the entire company was reunited at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference. Monty Program was a platinum sponsor of the event, as we stepped forward to ensure the conference happened when it seemed likely that Sun/Oracle would not be doing so. To their credit, Oracle came through in the end, and sponsored the conference.
As usual, the annual O’Reilly MySQL conference was a whirlwind of activity. Monty Program employees (myself included) were well represented on the speaker’s list. Monty himself gave an opening keynote one day. O’Reilly has posted an assortment of videos on YouTube, and if you couldn’t attend (or even if you did) they are worth a look.
We had a booth in the Expo Hall, and the turn-out was great. A LOT of people stopped by to chat, to offer encouragement, and to grab some free t-shirts and stickers. Thanks to our friends at System76 we were able to hold a raffle for a slick Meerkat NetTop computer. The System76ers are old friends from my Canonical days, and they have been a great supporter of the MariaDB community and Monty Program. Of course, all System76 machines run Linux, and in a supremely ironic twist the raffle winner was Chad Mumford, a Development Manager at Microsoft! I really hope Chad enjoys the Freedom (note caps) his new NetTop offers. 
Monty will be in the US again at the beginning of June to speak at Open Source Bridge in Portland, OR; an event we are again proud to sponsor this year.
Monty, Colin Charles, and I will be at OSCon in mid-July, as well as the Baconized Community Leadership Summit, which we are also sponsoring. Although I’ll miss Open Source Bridge this year (conflicts with my birthday), there’s something that keeps calling me back to PDX.
Monty Program will also be represented at the Linux Foudation’s second annual LinuxCon North America.
Monty will again be speaking at this event. We hope to have a MariaDB booth (not a Monty Program coporate thing, but a community booth) so if you plan on attending LinuxCon and want to help out in the booth, let us know! Any and all MariaDB community members are welcome to staff the booth.
Are you going to Open Source Bridge, the Community Leadership Summit, OSCon or LinuxCon? Don’t be shy!
May 21, 2010
digital
2 Comments
In February of this year the first -STABLE release of MariaDB was pushed out the door! Based on MySQL 5.1, MariaDB 5.1.42 has seen incremental point releases since the initial drop. Currently MariaDB 5.1.44b is our -STABLE release, and is available from the Monty Program website as well as all our mirrors. Debian and RedHat packages are available for most popular architectures.
This initial release incorporates a lot of community patches, bugfixes, new storage engine options and some new features. With MariaDB 5.1.4x you now have XtraDB, PBXT and FederatedX as optional storage engines. There are extended statistics for slow query logs. We have optimized table elimination, a pool of threads feature and enhancement, and much more. For a complete breakdown on what’s new, be sure to read the release notes. The MariaDB Manual should also be required reading. Also, be sure to read the log of contributions to see where from where community contributions were sourced.
We’re also at work on MariaDB 5.2 and 5.3. Both of these future milestone releases have open branches in Launchpad. MariaDB 5.2 is already in beta, and, like 5.1, downloads are available and there are Release Notes.
With -STABLE releases comes interest from distros. Thanks to Brian Evans’ work, there are now official official Gentoo ebuilds for MariaDB. Thanks Brian! Community member Michal Hrušecký did the work getting the MariaDB source into the openSuSE build service, and has added the resulting packages to the unstable DB repos.
As a Debian(+derivative) user, let me point out that “needs packaging” bugs have been filed for both Debian and Ubuntu. Our buildbot system creates packages, so if you’d like to do package review and sponsorship for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, or any other distro, let us know!
In addition to inclusion in distros, community member Mark has made VM images available. Mark also built the binary packages for Solaris/SPARC and Debian/SPARC. Awesome.
The MariaDB community rocks. Thanks to everyone that contributed their time and effort!
One easy way to contribute is to run a buildbot instance for us. My Monty Program colleague Kristian Nielsen has created a fully-automated buildbot system that churns out binaries and packages from source. The work he has done is nothing short of inspirational. And the good news is that it’s all open for your project’s use. Of course, if you have exotic hardware and want MariaDB on it, run a buildbot instance for us so that everyone benefits. We’re also in need of source and binaries ready for *BSD ports and package trees. Step up!
Monty Program developers and the MariaDB community are rocking some great code, and we’ve got stuff out the door. What we need is more volunteers to ensure we make it into distro repos, ports and package trees, and that we have buildable source on every OS and platform imagineable.
Get involved!
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