Bringing up the baby

At last we are code complete with Maria 1.5, the so called crash safe version of MyISAM. Note that code complete means that all features are coded, not that the code is 100 % bug free!

The code should be available soon in a bzr repository near you. We will also shortly (as soon as we pass all build tests) make a normal source and binary release of MySQL-5.1-Maria from here.

There is still a couple of minor bugs that we know about and we will fix them shortly, but nothing that should stop you from testing/using Maria. See the file KNOWN_BUGS.txt in the source release for details.

The current release plan for MySQL-5.1-Maria is as follows:

- The current release will be an alpha release. (Technically it could have been a beta release but because we have added so much new code we wanted to signal this by making another alpha release).

- If there is not any significant bugs found the would require a major rewrite of the code, we will for the next release fix the found bugs and make a beta release. This should hopefully be done August.

- We will continue doing one beta releases per month until there is no more redesign done and the new bug reports are down to a minimum. Then we will make a final RC and then a GA release (assuming everything goes well).

We have soo far been able to keep the opens bugs in Maria down to a minimum. This together with a quite large test suite make us, the Maria team, reasonable confident that we don't need many beta releases before we can come to RC and then GA. The more people that is downloading Maria to test and use it, the faster it will get stable. Please report any bugs you find and we will do our best to fix them!

At the same time we are merging MySQL-5.1-Maria into the standard MySQL-6.0 tree, where Maria will be a core part of the server.

The next step is to span of a MySQL-6.0-Maria tree in which we will start working on making Maria fully transactional and more concurrent.

Bug fixes that affects MySQL-5.1-Maria will of course be done in this tree and then be merged up to the MySQL-6.0 and MySQL-6.0-maria trees.

Those that are interested in known more about Maria, now and future, are welcome to my Maria talk and/or the Maria BOF at Oscon on July 24'th.

At Oscon Tim O'Reilly will interview Brian Aker and me on a keynote. . We will all do our best to make this a fun and unforgettable event!

Now it's time for me to go and have my well earned vacation. (I actually planned to go already last Monday, but I wanted to finish my part of the Maria project before going and now it's next Sunday...). At least I will get some rest from computers during the next two weeks as we don't have any electricity in my summer cottage up in Vasa.

Hope to see many of you at Oscon!

For a few dollars more

It's nice to be able to make a difference.

Since David Axmark and I started to work on MySQL we also took a strong stand against software patents. MySQL AB have been sponsoring several efforts to prevent software patents in Europa.

Now David and I are continuing to do this outside of MySQL AB. We just gave an economic sponsorship to the Patent Lens, who recently lost their main sponsor, so that it can continue it's important work in making the patents system more accessible.

Here is a short description of Patent Lens from it's founder, Richard A Jefferson:

We are working to generalize the Patent Lens as the informatics platform of the Initiative for Open Innovation, which aspires to render worldwide patent systems understandable and navigable, and to guide policy and practice reform. We intend to create a sector and jurisdiction agnostic resource that is open source, open access and free of cost.

The funding you may provide will keep a small core team going long enough to make it through these lean times and build new momentum.

If you are a philanthropist and if you care about open source software and don't have a love for the current patent system, I encourage you to join us in sponsoring Patent Lens. You can also try to get your company to sponsor.

David and I have also recently sponsored another company that works for Free and open source software, the Software Freedom Law Center.

We did it because we believe in what they are doing and we are greatful for all the help that Eben Moglen gave us in the past when we got into trouble.