2012-09-27

Now is a good time to be part of the future of MariaDB

We are now working full time on MariaDB 10.0, with the intention to release a stable server by the end of this year.

The new MariaDB release numbers are explained in this article.

The first binary, MariaDB 10.0.0-alpha will be released shortly.

The new, already developed, features are:
  • Multi-source replication. This is now being tested and will be pushed into the main branch shortly.
  • EXPLAIN the *actual* plan on a *running* statement
  • New InnoDB from MySQL 5.6
  • Performance schema from MySQL 5.6
  • Better error messages (all error numbers now include descriptive text of what the number means)
  • Optimized read only transactions (for InnoDB). This includes support for TRANSACTION READ ONLY (from MySQL 5.6)
  • LIMIT ... ORDER BY optimization (similar to MySQL 5.6)

With the last ORDER BY optimization MariaDB 10.0 has all the optimization features of MySQL 5.6 + much more (MariaDB has still more than 10 man years work on the optimizer compared to MySQL 5.6)

In addition we are working on:
  • Support for automatic updating of timestamps in DATETIME (similar to what is in MySQL 5.6, but a different implementation)
  • Memory tables with efficient VARCHAR and BLOB support
  • Merging more code from MySQL 5.6

Other areas of interest are:
  • Better replication (including parallel replication that can concurrently update the same table)
  • Improved multi-master and multi-source
  • More status variables and better monitoring
  • Optimizations to be able to run MariaDB better in the cloud.

For a full list, see the Plans for 10.x page and look at the plans for MariaDB 10.0 and beyond.

We will actively continue to merge code from MySQL 5.6 into MariaDB 10.0, 10.1 and hope to have all important features done by 10.2.

The reason we will need up to three releases to merge MySQL 5.6 is that we are not that happy with several parts of the MySQL 5.6 code base and we have to rewrite and reinvent those parts of MySQL 5.6 to be able to include them in MariaDB. This will take time!

We will do this in several steps to be able to do a release of MariaDB 10.x roughly every 6 months with many new features in each release, not only from MySQL 5.6.  The aim is to have all data-on-disk formats and protocol formats compatible with MySQL 5.6 so that one can upgrade from MariaDB 5.6 or MySQL 5.6 to any MariaDB 10.x release trivially.

I would like to see MariaDB developed to be a practical database; a database which is used to solve the real life problems you are facing today and tomorrow. To be able to do that, we are now actively seeking users, developers, and companies to get involved and help us drive MariaDB in the directions that make the most sense to them.

The ways you and your company can participate are:

  • Contribute with developer time. If your organization has talented developers familiar with the MariaDB and MySQL codebases they can become part of the MariaDB team and contribute to the development of the MariaDB project.
  • Fund the development of specific features. You can find a list of suggested features to sponsor here or in our project planning tool Jira. Feel free to sign in and add more projects to either place!
  • Hire a developer that you dedicate to work on the MariaDB project.
  • Join the different MariaDB mailing lists and channels to discuss where we should together put our resources to take MariaDB to the next level.
Please connect with us and help us steer MariaDB into the future and beyond!

2012-09-07

MariaDB Galera cluster released

While I was at Oscon and later at Froscon, one of the most frequent questions I heard was "When will you release MariaDB with Galera?"

Galera is a multi-master cluster solution for MySQL/MariaDB made by Codership.

The reason for the delay has been that we wanted, before the release, to do some QA testing of Galera so that we know how it performs, it's limitations and possible edge cases. Through this we did find some issues that Codership has acted upon.

Now it's finally released.

As this is the first release of MariaDB with Galera, we have labeled the release as 'alpha'. However, don't let the 'alpha' label scare you too much. Galera has been used in production by people I know and they are very happy with it.

Galera still has some rough edges, which Codership and we will work to eliminate over time.

See also Rasmus' blog about this.

Happy testing!