On Friday last week, after the intensive days of the conference, Ars Technica wrote and published a nice article about MariaDB including many of the messages we had been delivering during the conference, http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/mysql-founders-latest-mariadb-release-takes-enterprise-features-open-source.ars.

MariaDB seals

Last year, when it became clear that O’Reilly wasn’t going to arrange the MySQL user conference in the future, there was a lot of discussion on who should arrange it. In the end Percona was pretty fast informing everyone that they had booked the convention center in Santa Clara to arrange the conference this year. Now with the …

Well, as you or may not have heard, MariaDB 5.5 (5.5.23) was declared GA last week!

It was only about 6-ish weeks ago that MariaDB 5.5 had been released as alpha, so the fact it’s already GA is excellent news for all MariaDB users (and MySQL 5.5 users looking to migrate).

Some of the 5.5 enhancements include:

• Significantly more efficient thread pool, comparable in functionality to the closed source feature in MySQL Enterprise.
• Non-blocking client API Library (MWL#192)
• @@skip_replication option (MWL#234)
• SphinxSE updated to version 2.0.4.
• “extended keys” support for XtraDB and InnoDB
• New INSTALL SONAME statement
• New LIMIT ROWS EXAMINED optimization.
• mysql_real_connect() Changes
  In MySQL, and in MariaDB versions before 5.5.21, mysql_real_connect() …

In case you didn’t notice it last week, MariaDB 5.5 (5.5.20, specifically) has been released.

It’s a release I’ve been looking forward to for a while now, so I’m very excited that it’s now available!

Note that it is currently ‘alpha’ since it is the very first release of MariaDB 5.5. However, it is not your typical new ‘alpha’, so I would expect it to be GA in the not-so-distant future (please don’t quote me on this though, as I have no idea of the true time table – but the goal is for the next 5.5 release to be ‘beta’).

You can download MariaDB 5.5 from the following location:

http://downloads.askmonty.org/mariadb/5.5/

There are also more details on this 5.5.20 MariaDB version here:

What is MariaDB 5.5
…