We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha. MariaDB 5.5.20 is the first Alpha release in the 5.5 series. We hope to follow it up soon with a beta 5.5 release.

MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha is a merge of MariaDB 5.3 and MySQL 5.5 with some limited additional bug fixes. This is the first 5.5-based release, and we are releasing it now, intentionally without any extra features (and with it missing some planned features) to get it into the hands of any who might want to test it. Extra features planned for MariaDB 5.5 will be pushed into future releases.

As with any alpha release, MariaDB 5.5.20-alpha should not be used on production systems.

The Release Notes page has some notes on the release. There is also a  …

Ensuring sufficient disk I/O to catch copyright violations at network speed. Evidenzia GmbH & Co. KG

Issues addressed:

• Storage growth, including maxed-out disk I/O utilization
• Performance issues and business impact due to slow selects
• Inability to revise data schema on the fly

The Company: Evidenzia GmbH & Co. KG is one of the leading partners of the software, movie and music industry when it comes to tracing copyright infringements and illegal file sharing activities in peer-to-peer networks. Evidenzia helps copyright owners in protecting their intellectual property. Their powerful technologies enable …

We are excited to announce that we’ve been named as one of ten finalists selected for the startup showcase at the O’Reilly Strata “Making Data Work” Conference at the end of this month in Santa Clara, California. The startup showcase will be held on February 29th, starting at 6:30 pm.

The conference offers a great overview of the big data space, with tracks on Data Science, Business and Industry, Visualization and Interfaces, Hadoop Applied, Hadoop Tech, Policy and Privacy, and Domain Data. With all of the “NoSQL” buzz and sessions at the show (Hadoop gets two tracks!), we are glad …

iiBench measures the rate at which a database can insert new rows while maintaining several secondary indexes. We ran this for 1 billion rows with TokuDB and InnoDB starting last week, right after we launched TokuDB v5.2. While TokuDB completed it in 15 hours, InnoDB took 7 days.

The results are shown below. At the end of the test, TokuDB’s insertion rate remained at 17,028 inserts/second whereas InnoDB had dropped to 1,050 inserts/second. That is a difference of over 16x. Our complete set of benchmarks for TokuDB v5.2 can be found here.

…

TokuDB® v5.2, the latest version of Tokutek’s flagship storage engine for MySQL and MariaDB, is now available.

This version offers performance enhancements over previous releases, especially for multi-client scale up and point queries, and extends the cases where ALTER TABLE is non-blocking, in particular adding Hot Column Rename.

TokuDB v5.2 maintains all our established advantages: fast trickle load, fast bulk load, fast range queries through clustering indexes, hot schema changes, great compression, no fragmentation, and full MySQL compatibility for ease of installation. See our benchmark page for details.

Multi-client workloads

In TokuDB v5.2, we have reworked our locking scheme to better support multi-client workloads, and as always, we have focused on large databases. How did we do? Let’s check out some …

FictionPress

Issues addressed:

• Support complex and efficient indexes at 100+ million rows.
• Predicable and consistent performance regardless of data size growth.
• Fast recovery.

Ensuring Predictable Performance at Scale

The Company:  FictionPress operates both FictionPress.com and FanFiction.net and is home to over 6 million works of fiction, with millions of writers/readers participating from around the world in over 30 languages

The Challenge: FictionPress offers a number of interactive features to its large user base. These …

Limelight Networks

Issue addressed: Managing metadata at exabyte scale

Delivering Agile Storage in the Cloud with Billions of Assets

The Company: Founded in 2001, Limelight Networks, Inc (NASDAQ: LLNW) is an Internet platform and services company that integrates the most business-critical parts of the online content value chain. Limelight’s cloud-based services enable customers to profit from the shift of content and advertising to the online world, from the explosive growth of mobile and connected devices, and from the migration of IT applications and services to the cloud. More than 1,800 customers worldwide use Limelight’s massively scalable services to better engage audiences, optimize advertising, manage and monetize …

2012 is near… and so is the next FOSDEM edition !

This year again, MySQL will be represented by its Community.

If you want to discuss with friend’s of MySQL it’s the place to be in February !

Like every year, FOSDEM takes place the first week-end of February in Brussels.

The MySQL and Friends devroom is Room H.1309 (150 seats). We (the MySQL Community) will have the room on Sunday 5th February 2012, all day.

We are organizing a MySQL & Friends dinner on Saturday night, more to come later on this.

If you want to propose a talk (you are in fact invited to propose one !), the deadline is December 26th.
Like we did on past editions, as soon as the talks are submitted, we will ask everyone to vote on the talks via …

We have lately been talking about some upcoming features that we feel are important to MariaDB users, because the corresponding ones that will be provided with MySQL will be incompatible with MariaDB and closed source.

We’re happy to announce the following:

• The next version of MariaDB, version 5.2.10 will include an open source PAM Authentication Plugin. MariaDB 5.2.10 is scheduled for release next week.
• A Windows Authentication Plugin is in development and QA currently and will be part of MariaDB 5.2.11, which is scheduled for release before Christmas.
• MariaDB 5.5 will include both of the above plugins and an open source thread pool implementation. The soon-to-be-launched first version however will not include the thread pool.

Stay tuned for more information as soon as we start …

With the release of TokuDB v5.0 last March, we delivered a powerful and agile storage engine that broke through traditional MySQL scalability and performance barriers. As deployments of TokuDB have grown more varied, one request we have repeatedly heard from customers and prospects, especially in areas such as online advertising, social media, and clickstream analysis, is for improved performance for multi-client workloads.

Tokutek is now pleased to announce limited beta availability for TokuDB v5.2. The latest version of our flagship product offers a significant improvement over TokuDB v5.0 in multi-client scaling as well as performance gains in point queries, range queries, and trickle load speed. There are a host of other smaller changes and improvements that are detailed in our release notes (available to beta participants).

TokuDB continues to lead the field by offering:

• 20x to …