You can now find MariaDB 5.2 in your ports tree in FreeBSD. Check out ports/databases/mariadb. Its currently at MariaDB 5.2.4 and the package maintainer will continue updating it as new releases are made. Naturally the documentation in the Knowledgebase has been updated to reflect this.
Quickly and efficiently migrating hundreds of servers from MySQL to MariaDB
Via SpamExperts:
SpamExperts has their own anti-spam filtering cloud which is provided as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. In addition they have an e-mail security product which they install, update and monitor on-site. Most of SpamExperts’ anti-spam technology has been developed in-house and makes extensive use of the MySQL database. All clients contribute in real-time to their filtering effectiveness, so they have many different data flows that are handled by MySQL. Replication is used to synchronize the data between the systems in a cluster and to push data feeds in real-time. The SaaS cloud is replicated across four countries for redundancy, whereas client installations spread the data retrieval around the globe.
After extensive testing, SpamExperts managed the efficient migration of approximately three hundred servers from MySQL to MariaDB within three hours. “In the past we have run into various MySQL bugs. Despite the fact that we reported them, the bugs were still not solved after a year,” says Dreas van Donselaar Chief Technology Officer for SpamExperts B.V. “There were bugs in the upgrade procedure from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1, thus preventing us from using the entire new 5.1 feature-set”.
“MariaDB had the same bugs that we ran into with MySQL. However the big difference was that when we reported these bugs, they were quickly resolved within 48 hours!” exclaimed Dreas. The quick turnaround time bolstered confidence in the quality of the MariaDB product and its support and development teams.
During the testing phases, SpamExperts discovered a few bugs during the conversion that affected about 5% of their systems: long table names were not correctly converted, the thread_stack was too low on certain systems for MariaDB 5.1 which resulted in some crashes, newly created tables during the conversion resulted in table name conflicts and replication breakage due to table name changes. These bugs were all present in MySQL and have since been resolved in the MariaDB codebase. This process was resolved generally using Internet Relay Chat (IRC) on the #maria channel on irc.freenode.net.
Asked how SpamExperts is enjoying the use of MariaDB after a couple months of usage, Dreas responds: “Its running great! We have not encountered any major new issues. Its very nice to work with a team that is so passionate about its software and we believe it should allow MariaDB to quickly become the next relational database standard.”
After SQL-99, What’s Next?
As Hakan mentioned previously, the full text of SQL-99 Complete, Really by Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer, is now in the AskMonty.org Knowledgebase. Importing the text and formatting it for the Knowledgebase was a major project and I’m glad that it’s done.
Having the full text of this book freely available is a great thing for anyone who uses SQL because the book is about the SQL-99 standard and not about any particular database implementation. They do talk about different implementations, but those sections are clearly marked as such, and serve as examples of how some databases implement (or diverge from) the standard.
The question now is: What’s next? Both for the SQL-99 section, and for the Knowledgebase in general?
First, we want to integrate the SQL-99 text into the rest of the Knowledgebase. At present, it is largely isolated from the other main section (the MariaDB section). We’ll start by cross-linking between SQL-99 and MariaDB articles. Going forward we will incorporate the SQL-99 text into new and existing MariaDB-related articles, where appropriate.
Beyond SQL-99, we also want to grow the Knowledgebase into a repository of all sorts of database-related information. To that end, we’re on the lookout for more ready-made content to add to the Knowledgebase. If you own or control the rights to a database-related book, and would like to see it added, please contact us. We’re even willing to purchase the rights, if necessary. Bonus points if the book is directly about MariaDB or MySQL, but we’re also interested in other databases.
Speaking of the Knowledgebase, we just rolled out some updates to make it easier for anyone who wants to to participate in creating and editing content to get started. If you’d like to help out, please do! If you have questions on how to get started you can almost always find me and other Knowledgebase admins in #maria on Freenode (my Freenode nick is dbart) or you can join the maria-docs mailing list and ask there.