Month: May 2010

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!

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!

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!

Wow, it’s May! Time has flown.

It has been a while since I gave an update on MariaDB progress and what we’re doing at Monty Program, and so there’s a lot to catch up on!

In February the employees of Monty Program had a company meeting in Reykjavik. This was prior to the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, so if you were affected by the eruption, I guess you can blame us. 🙂

In April we attended the O’Reilly MySQL Conference, where many employees gave talks and others staffed our booth in the Expo Hall.

At the end of April my wife and I took a (well-deserved) 10 day vacation in the Dominican Republic. It was a much needed battery recharge.

I mention these events because I was responsible for planning them in the first two cases, and offline for the third. Meeting and conference planning is really time consuming, so I offer this as a reason (or perhaps an excuse) as to why I have not been a more active blogger.

That changes now. I’ll be making a series of posts designed to bring you up-to-date on what’s happening with MariaDB and Monty Program. To readers of the Planets to which I am syndicated (GNOME, Ubuntu, MySQL, etc) I apologize in advance if you considering my multiple posts “spammy.”