Greetings from MariaDB meeting in Istanbul

I am now back in Finland after the Monty Program Ab / MariaDB meeting in Istanbul.

As all our meetings, this meeting was also open to the public (except a few closed session about Monty Program Ab internals). As before, we had guests attending, and this time we had people from Facebook, Intel, Galera, Percona, SkySQL and from another database company. PBXT sent their greetings but could not attend because of customer meetings.

During the meetings, we presented our development plans for replication and for the new Knowledgebase system (KB). One of the objectives with the KB is to eventually create a free MariaDB / MySQL manual, but it's also a place to ask questions and find/get answers. We also had some hacking sessions, which gave me time to review the phone home feature that we will add to MariaDB 5.2. We also discussed the dynamic columns feature that is planned for MariaDB 5.3. We also had great presentations from Facebook and Intel that will help us improve MariaDB.

You can find the full Istanbul program here.

It was also very fun to be part of the SkySQL kickoff meeting that also happened to be in Istanbul (We didn't know that SkySQL would also be there when we planned our meeting. The two teams were mostly meeting at separate locations, but sharing one day together.). It was great to see a lot of old friends from the MySQL time and it felt like we had used a time machine to go 5 year back into the past (especially when "Helan går" was sung many days in a row by people that doesn't really speak Swedish). The old MySQL spirit is very much alive!

We had of course also a lot of good food (mostly kebab in a lot of different forms, including raw), visited a hamam, and did some sport and dancing. Henrik Ingo has documented some (un)memorable pieces in his blog.

What is becoming more and more clear is that MariaDB is not only a Monty Program Ab project. MariaDB is not only getting a lot of contributions from individual developers but there is also an increasing collaboration between companies working on the code. MariaDB 5.2 includes for example code (in no particular order) from Percona, OpenQuery, Primebase, Google, Sphinxsearch and Stardoll, and naturally from Oracle. In 5.3 and/or 5.5 we will in addition work with companies like Galera, Facebook, eBay, Sphaera and of course SkySQL to add many new features into MariaDB.

Next Monty Program Ab / MariaDB meeting will probably be in 6-9 months in Lissabon. Hope to see many of you there!

MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma is released

MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma is released

MariaDB 5.2 is finally released as gamma (RC). I had hoped to release this in July at Oscon but our new QA person, Philip Stoev, find at the last moment some problems with Aria recovery and virtual columns that we wanted to fix before doing the release.

The new features in 5.2 are quite isolated and as most have been in use by members in the MySQL community for a long time, we don't expect any big problems with 5.2 and we should be able to declare it stable within a few months.

5.2.2 gamma is based on MariaDB/MySQL version 5.1.50. It has the following new features:

Virtual columns

Columns that are an expression and are calculated on retrieval.

Extended User Statistics

Client, User, Index and Table statistics.

Segmented MyISAM key cache

The key cache's global mutex is split into several mutex which gives a notable speed improvement under multi user load; We have registered up to 70% more performance thanks to this.

Pluggable Authentication

Authentication is done via an extensible plugin, which makes it easy to add any kind of authentication to MariaDB.

Storage-engine-specific CREATE TABLE

Allows one to specify additional attributes per field, index or table to the storage engine.

Enhancements to INFORMATION SCHEMA.PLUGINS table

We expose more information about the plugins, like maturity levels.

Group commit for the Aria engine.

Speeds up multi user inserts.

New storage engines:

OQGRAPH (experimental quality)

Allows you to handle hierarchies (tree structures) and complex graphs (nodes having many connections in several directions).

Sphinx, a text-search engine (experimental quality)

A built-in Sphinx client which allows MariaDB to talk to searchd, run search queries, and obtain search results.

We have also done several smaller speed improvements and code cleanups.

We will now continue with working on MariaDB 5.3. As soon as MySQL 5.5 is stable enough, we will create a MariaDB 5.5 tree (based on MariaDB 5.3 + MySQL 5.5) and start working on that.

Please download MariaDB 5.2, test and give us feedback on maria-discuss@lists.launchpad.net or file a bug. We believe it's already quite stable, but we will only know after we have enough users testing it!