Tag Archives: mysql

Newsletters from the MariaDB dev meeting in Lisbon

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Every morning before any of the meetings get started I print out a small one page newsletter which contains (among other things) the program for the day. Rather than keep them private, Colin suggested I post them here. I call the newsletter the “MariaDB Programador de Journal” which (I think) translates to “MariaDB Programmer’s Journal” in Portuguese.

MariaDB Programador de Journal 11 March 2011
MariaDB Programador de Journal 12 March 2011

[Updated, 13 Mar 2011, to add the newsletter for that day.]

At the meeting we’ve also been taking notes and posting them online for what improvements we want to make this year in MariaDB to make it even better. You can find the notes in the Knowledgebase. If you have any suggestions for things you would like to see in the next version of MariaDB, please leave a comment in the Knowledgebase.

We want MariaDB to always be the best version of MySQL available anywhere, and letting us know what you need and new features that you like to have is an important part of the process.

MariaDB Programador de Journal 13 March 2011

The AskMonty Knowledge Base – Open for editing

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Almost a year ago we launched the AskMonty Knowledgebase, a home for information on MariaDB and MySQL. When we launched, only employees had access to write articles, though anyone could ask a question. This was done for technical reasons. The good news is that that has changed, with the latest version we just pushed live, anyone with an account (or an open ID) can create and edit articles.

There is only so much content we can write so we want your contributions, from completely new articles to editing and improving what we already have. If you have questions on how to get started, you can join the Maria Docs group on launchpad and ask on the mailing list. Or you can jump into the #maria channel on Freenode IRC and ask there (ask for dbart or balsdorf).

For those that want to translate articles into other languages (you know who you are) we haven’t forgotten about you. Our next major enhancement to the Knowledgebase is to add full i18n (i.e. internationalization) support. We’re working hard to get something workable up and available to one and all as fast as we can. Stay tuned!

Quickly and efficiently migrating hundreds of servers from MySQL to MariaDB

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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.”