2010-01-18

Invitation to test MariaDB 5.1 release candidate

We have now released MariaDB 5.1.41 RC for download and testing. You can download it here. It should be a drop in replacement for any recent MySQL 5.1 release.

We currently have tar archives available and we should have many package formats available shortly.

MariaDB 5.1 is based on MySQL 5.1 codebase, which has been GA for a year now. Most of the things we have included in addition to the vanilla 5.1 code upstream from Sun/MySQL (more on this below) have also been available in the community for quite a long time, so we are quite confident that this is a very stable release; however, being conservative we have had a four month Beta cycle before now going to RC.

I would now like to invite everyone in the community to download and test this release, and if the feedback is good will we then rapidly release a Final release.

On the Askmonty website you can find more information about what's included in MariaDB 5.1. But here are some highlights:

Storage engines

XtraDB replaces InnoDB so you get the Google and Percona enhancements built-in, no need to load it as a plugin. Basically this gives you most of the performance of the upcoming MySQL 5.4 today.

PBXT is included, I'm really happy that this interesting engine finally can get wider adoption thanks to being included and fully supported in MariaDB.

FederatedX by Patrick Galbraith and Antony Curtis is included. This replaces the old Federated from Sun which is not actively maintained by anymore.

And then of course we have Maria, which finally brings you MyISAM users crash safe tables.

Other highlights

The pool of threads feature is based on code from the canceled MySQL 6.0 release. This is good if you have lots of connections to your database and/or you have many short lived queries.

Table elimination is a feature done for a Monty Program customer, that optimizes certain kinds of joins.

In our effort to actively include all the patches floating around in the MySQL community, we have in 5.1 included Microslow and Microsec process patches from Percona. In 5.2 we will continue to include similar patches, there are still many of them floating around the MySQL community that have not yet found their way into a GA release.

We have also done speed improvements, fixed a lot of bugs, added extensions and added more information in the logs.

Please provide your feedback to the maria-developers@lists.launchpad.net list or join us on the #maria IRC channel on Freenode. The more testers we get the faster we can release a final version!

17 comments:

Mark Callaghan said...

Did you fix all of the problems described in http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2008/11/oops-we-did-it-again-mysql-51-released.html

Monty said...

Many of the problems are fixed by MySQL team since 5.1 GA, but not all.

For others, we are still waiting for MySQL to fix, as they have customers with paid for contracts that are eligible for a fix.

As a fork with limited resources, we can't fix every bug that exists in MySQL but have to depend on the owner of MySQL to fix the bugs they are responsible for.

What we can do is to fix all bugs in code that we (the MariaDB developers) write, we include in MariaDB or that affects customers of ours.

Anonymous said...

You have any plans to release a pre-built Windows binary of MariaDB RC (or any future version)? There are not only Linux server systems out there ... and I would really like to give it a whirl.

arekm said...

Was going to test it and leave it side by side with mysql. Unfortunately mariadb is highly conflicting with mysql (files conflicts).

Thus if you want to keep mysql and mariadb in a clean and sane way (hint: FHS standard) then you can't do that.

Well, staying with mysql for now.

Unknown said...

Arkadiuz, what you experience as a problem is actually the whole point of MariaDB: it's a drop-in replacement, so it uses exactly the same paths and filenames.

See http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB_versus_MySQL#Things_to_add_to_MariaDB_5.1_before_stable_release

Monty said...

About windows builds:

MariaDB builds cleanly on windows.We are now working on windows builds, but it will take some time to stabilize our build farm to support windows reliably. We also have to create an installer for Windows as the MySQL installer is not Open Source.

Monty said...

About conflicting file names:

As MariaDB is designed to be a drop in replacement for MySQL, we have to use the same path and files names as MySQL.

It's still easy to run MariaDB and MySQL at the same computer if you use the tar files, which can be installed and run from anywhere.

Another option is to just replace the mysqld and error message files from an MariaDB installation.

We have thought about also making an alternative package available that would use different base paths. We will look more closely on this if there is a lot of demand for this.

Anonymous said...

Any chance for Solaris/Opensolaris binaries?

Monty said...

About OpenSolaris binaries:

We hope to have these, and a lot of other binaries, available soon.

We aim to produce binaries and packages to most platforms; It will however take some time as we don't have access to all relevant platforms yet. If you want to help, you can find information on our BuildBot wiki page.

Oscar Rydberg said...

A couple of questions I've not found any anwers to:

Does your initial MySQL5.1 GA opinion still apply to the seemingly latest 5.1.42 from MySQL?

Are there any extensive reviews of MariaDB compared with MySQL?

Would you consider MariaDB RC (XtraDB) to be a more stable alternative than MySQL (InnoDB) for a production environment?

Any comments on the rowbased replication introduced in 5.1? (Stability and if MariaDB have some improvements in mind)

Finally a big thanks and cheers for a great initiative with MariaDB!

Quran said...

Thanks a lot,We hope that to have these, and a lot of other binaries, available very soon.

Monty said...

To Oscar:

About state of MySQL 5.1 GA, see my answer to Mark Callaghan (my first reply to comments).

There is no extensive public reviews of MariaDB compared to MySQL, expect the one that we have on askmonty.org.

XtraDB should in practice be as stable as InnoDB for a production environment; After all, the code has been used in production environment for more than a year. It's of course not as tested as InnoDB so there may be some bugs left (on the other hand, there are also bugs that are fixed in XtraDB (and the InnoDB plugin) that is not fixed in the default InnoDB).

The same goes for MariaDB; We don't have as many users as MySQL, but as long as you don't use some of the newer storage engines, MariaDB should be as stable (or probably more as we have fixed several critical MySQL bugs) as MySQL.

The new storage engines should be relatively safe too, but until we have had a big user base using them it's impossible to know. If you plan to use them in a production environment, I recommend you to do proper testing first!

The row based replication code is still the same in MySQL 5.1 and MariaDB 5.1; As far as I know, most of the replication issues since MySQL 5.1 GA are now fixed.

In MariaDB 5.3 we are adding some new improvements to row based replication (like being able to see the statement that caused a row based change). We are also working with Continuent and Galera on a new replication framework.

Anonymous said...

Sorry if you've already mentioned it, but about what date do you expect XtraDB as a transactional storage engine to be released? And does MariaDB have plans to fork MySQL-Cluster?

Monty said...

About XtraDB & Cluster:

XtraDB is already released in MariaDB 5.1, so it's ready to use.

MariaDB 5.1 does includes the Cluster code, but it's not enabled as default as the MySQL 5.1 cluster code is quite old and not maintained.

For the moment we don't have any plans to fork and maintain MySQL cluster because we don't have anyone who knows enough of it to be able to maintain it. (It would be a full time job for 3-5 people to do this)

cprogrammer said...

I have a mail server IndiMail - http:/www.indimail.org which uses MySQL.

Just downloaded MariaDB 5.1.41 source and installed it. Everything works fine. Somehow, I wasn't feeling comfortable about this MySQL oracle thing. Now I am happy.

Rangalal said...

I was using MySQL with NDB storage engine. There was a row length limitation (8k) in previous release with NDB storage engine.

I want to know cluster support capability of Maria DB and is there any limitation like mention here. Do you planing to introduce new cluster support storage engine or continue with NDB ?

I am waiting for your response.

Rangalal said...

How can i deploy MariaDB with fail over solutions ?