This is a nice blog post from Asher Feldman, Site Architect, Wikipedia on how Wikipedia Adopts MariaDB. If you’re using English or German Wikipedia, or using Wikidata, you’re currently being served by MariaDB 5.5.

MariaDB is very happy to be accepted as a project in the Google Summer of Code 2013. This will be our first year participating and we’re stoked that we’re one of the accepted organizations. We have an ideas list as always, and we’re expecting to get some great mentors & students to hack on some new code for the MariaDB project (which now comprises not just the server, but Galera Cluster as well as the connectors). Watch this space for more information, but if you’re interested in hacking on MySQL, MariaDB, Galera Cluster or some of the Percona toolkit, and it’s a summer’s worth of work, this should be a lot of fun!

Team MariaDB will be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013, held in Santa Clara from April 22-25 2013. We will also be at the SkySQL Solutions Day held on April 26 2013 at the same venue, the Hyatt Santa Clara. We have talks, a booth in the DotOrg Pavilion, have a BoF and we’re participating in the passport program.

Team MariaDB talks:

1. (Monday) Advanced Query Optimizer Tuning & Analysis, a tutorial by Sergei Petrunia & Timour Katchaounov
2. (Tuesday)  …

MariaDB 5.5 is now inside of OpenBSD, the free, functional & secure OS. The work started a few weeks ago, and now you can get MariaDB via the ports tree. And yes, it will replace the current MySQL 5.1 that ships in the next release.

MariaDB has had pluggable authentication since MariaDB 5.2. Our most popular authentication plugin that we ship in MariaDB is the PAM authentication plugin. Naturally one is curious to see if users would like to see more authentication plugins being made available, so we’ve posted a poll on Facebook. Please feel free to add your vote to the poll so we have a better idea of where to focus our future pluggable authentication development.

Two bits of good news for MariaDB users from the distribution standpoint this week:

• Slackware Linux is dropping MySQL for MariaDB as a default
• Arch Linux replaces MySQL in repositories with MariaDB

Congratulations to the openSUSE community on a successful release of openSUSE 12.3. A highlight worth mentioning is that MariaDB is now the default as opposed to MySQL. What are you waiting for, download it!

From the features list, here’s an excerpt focusing on MariaDB & MySQL:

openSUSE has moved from MySQL to MariaDB as default. MariaDB was first shipped with openSUSE 11.3 back in 2010. Over the years it proved itself and starting with 12.3 openSUSE is replacing default MySQL implementation with MariaDB. This means that whole distribution is compiled against MariaDB and in ‘M’ in LAMP means MariaDB from now. As MariaDB is a drop-in …

Alongside SkySQL, we participate in SkySQL & MariaDB Meetups. These events are free to attend and you’ll get to meet & speak with SkySQL CEO Patrik Sallner and all round MariaDB man (& MySQL creator) Michael “Monty” Widenius. 

1. Roadshow in Amsterdam, the Netherlands – 21 March 2013
2. Roadshow in Paris, France – 27 March 2013

If you’re at the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo Santa Clara (many of us from Team MariaDB are speaking), you should consider spending the extra day there as on Friday April 26 2013, there exists the …

We released the release candidate for MariaDB Galera Cluster on 21st December 2012, not traditionally the best time to make a release. We want to make this a GA release soon and we also want to ensure its well tested. Download it. Read the release notes. Give us feedback/report bugs.  Blog about it too!

I think MariaDB has had a great few weeks recently and the timeline of these events are important.

1. 27 November 2012 – WiredTree Adds MariaDB for Faster MySQL Database Performance (well worth reading their motivations to switch)
2. 29 November 2012 – Monty Program & SkySQL release the MariaDB Client Library for C & Java
3. 4 December 2012 – MariaDB Foundation is announced, see ZDNet coverage.
4. mid-December 2012 – Wikimedia Foundation starts migrating …