One could say that MariaDB now is 2 years old as a packaged product. The latest version, MariaDB 5.3 Beta, is the culmination of many years of hard work. We believe it contains the largest and most significant change to the code of MySQL since the launch of MySQL 5.0. I’m talking about the changes made to the central product component called the Optimizer.

Why did we touch something so central to the product? The fast answer is that the original Optimizer is about 17 years old. Prior to the work we did for MariaDB 5.3, the Optimizer hadn’t had any huge evolutionary improvements or changes in a decade (except for some features that were added in 2003-2005). It was missing basic functionality that one can expect in any 2010s relational database. Things like hash joins or efficient handling of subqueries.

We’ve also wanted to gradually make MariaDB better at handling bigger tables and bigger queries. This requires query plans to …

Ben Forta, the author of MySQL Crash Course and Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, has written what I believe is the first MariaDB-specific book: MariaDB Crash Course. I just received word from Ben that the book is now shipping.

Most MySQL books can, of course, be used to learn almost everything you need to know about using MariaDB. But with all of the features and abilities MariaDB has gained in the MariaDB 5.2 and MariaDB 5.3 releases, it’s nice there is now a book specific to MariaDB.

You don’t need to know anything about MariaDB or MySQL in order to get the most …

One lesson learned in more than two decades working in this industry is that most of the IT professionals are impatient, want to achieve results immediately, and, most importantly, they don't read documentation. Much as the average geek is happy to answer many requests with a dismissive RTFM, the same geeks are not as diligent when it comes to learning about new or updated technologies. For this reason, there is a kind of documentation that is very much appreciated by busy and impatient professionals: cookbooks. And I am not talking about food. Geeks are not known for being cooks (1) and they like fast food. I am talking about collection of technical recipes, short articles where a problem is briefly stated, and a direct solution is shown. Working with Tungsten Replicator, I am constantly amazed at all the things you can do with it, and at the same time, I am amazed at how so few …

I saw yesterday that MySQL has finally done the right thing, and announced new commercial extensions.
What this means is that paying customers receive something more than users who get the community edition for free.
Believe it or not, when I was working in the community team at MySQL, I was already an advocate of this solution. You may see a contradiction, but there isn't. I would like to explain how this works.

An open source product needs to be developed. And the developers need to get paid. Ergo, the company needs to make money from that product if it wants to continue developing it. Either that, or the company needs to sell something else to pay the bills. (Let's not get into the argument that a pure open source project with universal participation is better, faster, or more marvelous: MySQL was never that, …

You might remember that MySQL was aquired by Sun, which later went into Oracle (who won’t? ). As usual in such a process network infrastructure is being merged to ease managing it. Such a merge is currently in process with the effect that previously publicly available servers are now behind Oracle’s firewalls. From a security point of view this is good news, not so for services that relied on this access. One of them is our copy of all old GUI tools repositories on Launchpad. These repositories have been made available 3 years ago when we prepared the switch to MySQL Workbench as our main product. The idea behind it was that anybody who is interested can work on the code and propose patches.

As you can see there this hasn’t worked out well. No merges were proposed during all the time, so we are going to use this interruption of the Launchpad mirroring to stop this …

In July I wrote a blog post MySQL community counseling: talking about your feelings. It was triggered by an earlier blog post and followup threads on Google plus by Monty Taylor, Andrew Hutchings, etc... (everyone involved in that outburst have apologized and moved on long ago). I wanted to use that opportunity to highlight what I call our hidden trauma related to the Oracle acquisition of Sun, things that I still hear being discussed today, 2 years later, and things that I consider unresolved or unsolved that I see causing friction and misunderstandings - the kind of which that outburst too represented. Both before and after writing it I wondered if it was a good idea to publish it - I wondered whether I would be seen as helping to solve the problem or just contributing to it. I actually got some positive feedback about it, …

If you missed the MySQL Community Reception in Santa Clara in April, here is another opportunity to mingle and have fun!

Come celebrate the growth of the MySQL community with Oracle's MySQL team in San Francisco, CA on October 4, Tuesday. Although the event is held in conjunction with Oracle OpenWorld, no conference registration is required; everyone is invited to the MySQL Community Reception. If you're attending the sessions in the MySQL Track at Oracle OpenWorld, the reception is conveniently located in Marriott Marquis where all the MySQL sessions will be held, so you definitely shouldn't miss …

If you missed the MySQL Community Reception in Santa Clara in April, here is another opportunity to mingle and have fun!

Come celebrate the growth of the MySQL community with Oracle's MySQL team in San Francisco, CA on October 4, Tuesday. Although the event is held in conjunction with Oracle OpenWorld, no conference registration is required; everyone is invited to the MySQL Community Reception. If you're attending the sessions in the MySQL Track at Oracle OpenWorld, the reception is conveniently located in Marriott Marquis where all the MySQL sessions will be held, so you definitely shouldn't miss …

We’re pleased to let you know that the 2nd episode of our “Meet The MySQL Experts” podcast series, where Oracle engineers share their expertise, is now available.

Wei-Chen Chiu interviews InnoDB team member Inaam Rana who comes back on the new InnoDB features and improvements delivered in MySQL 5.5 and in the first development milestone release of MySQL 5.6. Inaam also talks to us about the InnoDB features available in labs.mysql.com.

Enjoy!