Lots of MariaDB releases...

Today we released MariaDB 5.5.23 as stable (GA). The last few days we have also released MariaDB 5.3.6 stable (second GA release) and MariaDB 5.2.12 and MariaDB 5.1.62.

The reason for doing the older releases was that we found a very serious security issue in all recent MariaDB / MySQL releases and we strongly recommend everyone to upgrade to one of the above releases ASAP. We have informed Oracle of the problem and they are likely to issue a new MySQL release soon!

That said, I am very happy that MariaDB 5.5 is finally available as a stable release and I wish you the best of luck with it!

MariaDB 5.5 includes all features from MySQL 5.5 and MariaDB 5.3 (with the exception of OQGraph for which we are awaiting a patch from the OQgraph developers to solve a compatibility issue).

MariaDB 5.5 is a drop in replacement for MySQL 5.5. Here is a
short list of the new features in MariaDB 5.5 compared to the MySQL 5.5 community release:

* Better optimizer (Faster complex queries and sub queries)
* Efficient thread pool
* Pluggabale authentication with PAM plugin
* Non-blocking client API Library
* More storage engines
* Microsecond precision
* Table elimination
* Virtual columns
* Extended user statstics
* MyISAM segmented key cache
* Group commit (Makes replication significantly faster!)
* Progress reporting for ALTER TABLE and LOAD DATA INFILE.
* Dynamic columns (a nosql feature)
* Spatial GIS extensions
* A lot of speed improvements like faster heap tables, character conversions etc.

For a full list, please see our Knowledgebase which has lists of features for each release.

We are also working on MariaDB-5.5-galera, a MariaDB cluster edition together with the Galera people. We expect that we will have a binary release of this soon.

If you want to know more about all the new features in MariaDB, you can find many of the MariaDB core developers, including me, at the MariaDB.org booth at the Percona Live conference in Santa Clara during Thursday or at the SkySQL / MariaDB conference on Friday.

We will also have a MariaDB BOF on Wednesday at 21.00 in Ballroom A.
Hope to see many of you there!

Free MariaDB(R) & MySQL(R) conference day

SkySQL recently announced the Solutions Day for the MySQL Database to be held on the 13'th of April at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara.

At this conference you will, for the first time in 3 years, again see David Axmark and me on stage on a keynote about the state of MySQL and MariaDB and how we envision the future of these products!

There will also be a lot of tech talks about MySQL and MariaDB from the original MySQL creators as well as on related products from other people in the MySQL / MariaDB community.

Do register in advance, I look forward to seeing you there!

This day will be free for anyone to participate. There will also be free black vodka later in the evening.

MariaDB 5.3.3 RC released.

Just in time for Christmas, we have made MariaDB 5.3.3 Release candidate available for download.

Looking at the number of changes and new features, MariaDB 5.3 is probably the biggest milestone release in MySQL history since 5.0:

• Fast sub queries and better optimizer
• Faster and better replication
• NoSQL extensions
• New important types (Microseconds)

And much more.

MariaDB 5.3 is also important as MariaDB 5.5 is based on this. The merge of the code bases are already completed and as soon as our testing is complete (estimated to a couple of weeks) we will release MariaDB 5.5-beta.

A merry holiday and happy new year to you all!

Commercial use of MariaDB & Webinar with SkySQL

A lot of things is happening in the MariaDB world; We just had our developers conference in Athens, we are about to bring out MariaDB 5.3 -RC and MariaDB 5.5-beta. MariaDB 5.5 will include all the closed source extensions that Oracle have announced for MySQL 5.6. It's nice to see that the open source community can continue to produce open source software to rival and exceed closed source offerings.

At the same time, we need commercial goals to support the growth of free software. The development crew in Monty Program Ab, all ex-MySQL developers, are happy to develop features based on commercial agreements. These will of course be released as open source to the benefit of the entire community of users. The support staff of SkySQL is happy to give you commercial 24x7 support of MariaDB, so you have the same level of support that you werea used to for MySQL in the days of MySQL AB: The first person you talk to should know more than you about MySQL!

The fact that we at Monty Program focus on development should by no means deter you from relying on MariaDB in commercial settings. Our work with SkySQL is intended to accelerate adoption for users and customers who need mission critical services.

To learn how you best extend your usage of MariaDB inside a commercial organization, consider taking part in the SkySQL webinar on Thursday 8 Dec 2011 at 8am PT (11am ET, 16:00 UK, 17:00 CET, or 18:00 EET).

Unfortunately I will not be there to share Black Vodka with you, but other familiar voices will present for you

• Colin Charles, the Chief Evangelist at Monty Program, on when and why to use MariaDB in a commercial setting
• Rasmus Johansson, the Monty Program COO, on the offerings of Monty Program Ab and how to interact with us commercially
• Kaj Arnö, EVP Products at SkySQL, on how SkySQL supports MariaDB users technically and commercially

The webinar is a good time to give us feedback on what we need to do to make it easier for you to adopt MariaDB and/or get more of MySQL in critical and high performance environments.

You can register to the seminar here.

MariaDB developer meeting in Athens

It's time for the next MariaDB developer meeting. This time it's in Athens from 11-November to 14'th of November.

The reason for choosing Athens was that the previous MariaDB developer meetings has been in places like Iceland, Spain and Portugal (all countries with some financial issues) and we thought it was no more than right to support Greece next.

As before, the meeting is open for everyone that wants to attend.

The agenda can be found here. This is also the place where all proposed and agreed to plans will be be posted.

We will try to keep the #maria IRC channel on Freenode up to date about what is happening. If you have any questions about a session, you can ask questions on the channel and we will do our best to answer them.

The main topic of the meeting is to finalise the plans for MariaDB 5.6 now when MariaDB 5.5 is close to completion. (MariaDB 5.3 + MySQL 5.5 -> MariaDB 5.5 merge is done and we are now fixing the final issues found by our test systems so that we can do the first alpha binary release of MariaDB 5.5).

If you have any ideas or suggestions for what we should do in 5.6, please update either the plans page or send an email to maria-developers at lists.launchpad.net list.

Oracle adding close source extensions to MySQL

Oracle has now officially announced that MySQL is not a full free software project anymore and that they will go for an Open Core model.

This is inconsistent to the original MySQL business model. The main strength of MySQL has always been that all MySQL source code was freely available. It was thanks to this that MySQL got widely adopted and got to be used by tens of millions of users.

This was a fact that the MySQL board and Sun understood. Closing the MySQL server code base in any manner would be bad for long term business.

It's true that we in MySQL Ab did have some people, notable persons who came from the commercial world and did not understand or believe in free software, that spoke strongly for an open core model where some parts would be open and others closed. Initially they could not do this, mainly thanks to the founders shareholder agreement which guaranteed that the MySQL server would be open source. When Sun bought MySQL, and the shareholder agreement expired, they saw their chance and announced that backup would be a commercial closed source extensions. This initiative was however quickly killed by Sun's management who did understand the true value of MySQL as an open source project and by making it closed source they would have made it less valuable.

One of the reasons MySQL AB did not need an open core model for it's business was that since MySQL is an infrastructure product that is easily embeddable into other products, we could sell licenses to those who wanted to embed MySQL into their product but did not want to make their product open source. (Dual licensing).

So what's so wrong with Open Core?

As a business model, especially to bootstrap a business, Open Core is not a bad idea. It gives you some leverage with your users to get part of your development paid for. This is however done at the cost of fewer users and a less adopted project. Many projects however abandon Open Core models when they grow as open source gives them more users and thus more value.

What is most important to understand about an Open Core project is that it has nothing to do with an open source project. If you are depending on a single closed source component then you have to regard the whole project as a closed source project as you lose all the benefits of open source:

• You are depending on one vendor.
• You can't do any bug fixes yourself and you can't contract anyone except the original vendor to get things fixed.
• You can't examine and improve the product (not any part of if).
• You can't use any open source or commercial extensions from anyone else. This is true also for any plugins that access any internal parts of the product (which is true for most MySQL plugins).
• You are limited to the platforms that the original vendors makes available. (In MySQL's case you can't for example use the new commercial features on RedHat 6 as it's not a supported platform).
• The builds you are using are not tested anymore by millions of users (more bugs).
• The product is not checked by the open source community for security problems or back doors.
• The new features will not be adopted by (and may even cause conflicts with) other open source projects.
• You are subject to one vendor's price politics which they can change at their convenience.
  

What is interesting with the new commercial features is that parts of them where not developed by Oracle. The thread pool was originally developed by Ebay for MySQL 5.0 and contributed to MySQL to be include in MySQL 5.1. Only the new scheduler interface code was added to MySQL 5.1 while the thread pool itself was added (but accidentally with a slower implementation) into MySQL 6.0. Oracle never back ported the thread pool code to the MySQL 5.5 community version and now also the MySQL 6.0 tree is deleted.
The new pluggable authentication, which makes the new PAM authentication possible, was developed and contributed to Oracle by Sergei Golubchik at Monty Program Ab.

The good news is however that the most important feature, the improved thread pool, is easily duplicated in MariaDB. We have had a thread pool in MariaDB since 5.1 (better than was in MySQL 5.1) and we are working on a new one for MariaDB 5.5 which we expect will have similar speed gains as MySQL enterprise. MariaDB don't yet have PAM authentication but the MariaDB developers are prepared to develop that if there is a need for it or if someone contributes the code to us. This should be relatively easy as we have the same pluggable authentication protocol as MySQL.

Read also Stewart Smith's thoughts and the comments to his blog about this subject.

What is happening with the MySQL conference?

What is happening with the MySQL conference?

I'm at the moment perplexed, confused and disappointed in what's going on around the traditional MySQL user conference. Percona yesterday announced Percona MYSQL conference that they will be organizing their own event during the same time and in the same place where this great conference has taken place for years.

The reason for my state of mind is that although there have been rumors about discontinuance of the O'Reilly arranged conference there hasn't been any announcement about this.

In fact, I have been working with O'Reilly to try to setup next year's O'Reilly MySQL conference with the intention of having it 'exactly like before', even if Oracle would not participate. The intention was to have Percona, SkySQL and Monty Program Ab and some other sponsors helping O'Reilly to drive the conference.

This is something that Percona has been very well aware of when announcing this (I personally talked with Percona about this a few weeks ago).

One of the main reasons we at MySQL Ab originally liked to work with O'Reilly is not only that O'Reilly knows how to do a good conference. We also saw the importance to have the conference being organized by a neutral entity to make it easier for competing vendors to be part of the conference. A conference called the "Percona MySQL conference" is not going to be seen as vendor neutral, which will cause problems in getting different vendors to attend. Giuseppe Maxia and Sheeri Cabral seem to think in a similar ways.

Personally I will wait and see what will happen with the O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2012, or equivalent neutral conference for the MySQL community. The best option, if O'Reilly is not doing it, would of course be a community conference where Oracle/MySQL participates actively, both as a sponsor and as content provider.