Today marks a milestone in terms of the MariaDB project – going forward, the MariaDB project plans to use Github and git for source code management. The migration happens from Launchpad and the bzr tool.

The 10.1 server development (under heavy development now) will happen on Github. You can check it out here: https://github.com/MariaDB/server. Feel free to watch, star or even fork the code, and send us contributions!

Previous maria-captains should now provide their Github IDs so that they can be accorded similar status. Send the IDs to the maria-developers mailing list.

The project eventually wants to move the 10.0, 5.5, 5.3, …

I’m always switching back-and-forth between the 2 different InnoDB flavors in MariaDB – XtraDB+ and the standard InnoDB plugin, so I thought I’d simply post all of the various combinations in a single place. (And then I cover enabling the InnoDB Plugin in MySQL, since it’s an option in 5.1.) [Addition: Thanks to Andrew and Sergei for the tips on shortening plugin-load=. The changes are reflected below.]

Note: Below is for Windows. For Linux, simply change “.dll” to “.so” where appropriate.

MariaDB 10.0:

Do not add anything, as the standard InnoDB plugin is the current default (as of 10.0.3, although I do anticipate this changing in the near future, and I’ll update the post accordingly when that happens).

MariaDB 5.5:

# Enable the 2 below to disable XtraDB+ and enable the standard InnoDB Plugin
ignore_builtin_innodb
plugin-load=ha_innodb.dll

…

We’re quite happy that we’ve released four major releases that are production ready (better known as generally available or GA in the MySQL world) in the last 26 months. That is just a little over two years, and a whole lot of features. In that same time, MySQL has seen one GA release (MySQL 5.5) and we’re all eagerly awaiting the upcoming MySQL 5.6.

You’ll note that we built MariaDB 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 based on the MySQL 5.1 codebase. A significant number of features went into MariaDB 5.3 (our biggest GA release to date), with the biggest changes in the optimizer in over a decade. There were also many replication based …

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.3.6. This stable (GA) release incorporates MySQL 5.1.62, some performance improvements, and several bug fixes.

Most importantly, MariaDB 5.3.6 includes a fix for a bug which, under certain rare circumstances, allowed a user to connect with an invalid password. This is a serious security issue. We recommend upgrading from older versions as soon as possible.

• MariaDB 5.3.6 Release Notes
• MariaDB 5.3.6 Changelog
• MariaDB 5.3.6 …

This is another, in-case-you-missed-it, but it is definitely worth mentioning again:

MariaDB 5.3 is now GA

So, if you’re using MariaDB 5.1 or 5.2, I’d definitely recommend upgrading to the new MariaDB 5.3.

Also, if you’re a Windows user using MySQL 5.1, I’d highly consider making the switch to MariaDB 5.3 due to all of the Windows-specific improvements in it.

MariaDB 5.3 Enhancements:

• Subquery optimizations
• Semi-join subquery optimizations
• Non-semi-join optimizations
• Subquery Cache
• Subquery Optimizations Map
• Optimizations for derived tables and views
• Disk access optimization
• Join optimizations
• Index Merge improvements
• Optimizer control
• NoSQL-style interfaces
• Group commit for the binary log
• Replication and binary logging enhancements …

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 …

There are many new features in MariaDB 5.3. I’m looking forward to many of them, but one of the ones I’m most excited about is Progress Reporting.

It’s a fact of life in the database world that some commands take longer to run than others. Commands like ALTER TABLE, LOAD DATA INFILE, and adding and dropping an index simply take time to run, depending (of course) on your data and schema. I always have hated having to wait for those commands to run with no indication of how much progress has been made or how much is left to do. All of that changes with the upcoming release of MariaDB 5.3.

In MariaDB 5.3 there is a new “Progress” column in the output of SHOW PROCESSLIST (this can be turned off) which …