MariaDB 10.10 preview releases now available

We are pleased to announce the fourth MariaDB series release under the new release model, MariaDB 10.10.0.

Maturing MariaDB more quickly

One of the purposes of the new model is to get features into the hands of users more quickly, in a form which supports stability by allowing the new feature to be more easily tested, separate from other new features being developed at the same time.

Candidate features for MariaDB 10.10

There are four separate preview releases, containing the following features under consideration for release in 10.10.1:

Replication

  1. Change defaults for CHANGE MASTER TO so that GTID-based replication is used by default if master supports it (MDEV-19801)
  2. Deprecate MASTER_USE_GTID=Current_Pos to favor new MASTER_DEMOTE_TO_SLAVE option (MDEV-20122)

Optimizer

  1. Improve optimization of joins with many tables, including eq_ref tables (MDEV-28852)
  2. * Table elimination does not work across derived tables (MDEV-26278)

UCA14 Collation

  1. Add UCA-14.0.0 collations (MDEV-27009)
  2. Improve contraction performance in UCA collations (MDEV-27265)
  3. Improve UCA collation performance for utf8mb3 and utf8mb4 (MDEV-27266)

DDL

  1. ALTER ONLINE TABLE (MDEV-16329)
  2. Atomic CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE (MDEV-25292)

Galera

  1. Implement a method to add IPs to allowlist for Galera Cluster node addresses that can make SST/IST requests (MDEV-27246)

Miscellaneous

  1. Change default of explicit_defaults_for_timestamp to ON (MDEV-28632)
  2. –ssl option set as default for mariadb CLI (MDEV-27105)
  3. Add RANDOM_BYTES function (MDEV-25704)
  4. The INET4 data type (MDEV-23287)
  5. Re-design the upper level of handling UPDATE and DELETE statements (MDEV-28883)
  6. Deprecate the DES_ENCRYPT/DECRYPT functions (MDEV-27104)

On the download page for 10.10.0, you will see sources in Linux (x86-64 bintar) and source formats only.

Hired: Chief Contributions Officer

Openness, Adoption, Continuity: That’s the mantra of three words MariaDB Foundation uses to describe its mission. At the core of Openness are contributions of code to MariaDB Server. The good news: We are now putting more resources into contributions, by hiring Andrew “LinuxJedi” Hutchings as Chief Contribution Officer, starting today Monday 15 Aug 2022.

A senior position

As you can see already from Andrew’s title, it’s a senior position. When we opened up the position, we were fully aware that only a handful of candidates can fulfil our requirements of experience on the code base.

MariaDB & K8s: How to replicate MariaDB in K8s

In the previous blog we have seen how to create a statefulset MariaDB application. Also, we learned how replication works in MariaDB in this blog. Now, we will try to create a replicated statefulset application. As good references for creating this blog, I would like to give credit to the Kubernetes documentation as well as an example from Alibaba Cloud.

Configure replication

To replicate a MariaDB application we are going to create a statefulset that will consist of a single init container and one application container.

A mirror manager system to simplify the distribution of MariaDB binaries and packages

The MariaDB Foundation relies on public mirrors to distribute binaries and packages to the world. An overview of the full list can be seen at https://mirmon.mariadb.org. If you would like to volunteer to become a mirror, take a look at https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mirror-sites-for-mariadb/.

Our download page already automatically suggests one of those mirrors for you to download our binaries. Same goes for the repository configuration tool; see https://mariadb.org/download.

The purpose of this blog post is to present you a new system that we have been testing since December 2021 and that we believe is now ready for public adoption.

An intra-pandemic Staff Meeting

Well over two years ago was the last time the MariaDB Foundation staff had met. That was at FOSDEM, in February 2020. Thus, no big surprise, one of our topmost goals for 2022 was to have a staff meeting, face to face. It’s about time to oil the social relationships, to work together without connection issues, to be reminded of how work and life can be in a world where Covid isn’t the top issue.

In other words: we planned a post-pandemic Staff Meeting.

The outcome was different. 

Choosing the venue

But let us start from the beginning, from the original euforia.

We’re hiring: Senior MariaDB Developer / Code Reviewers

Yes, we are hiring! 

And we are hiring for quite an interesting position: As a senior developer of MariaDB Server, with merging community code contributions as a main task.

A demanding job

This is a very demanding job. The MariaDB Server code base is large and complex, and being a good C / C++ developer is only the starting point for being able to contribute to it. You also need to understand databases, and the existing codebase architecture.

A demanding code base

The existing codebase is demanding. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either very efficient (if you know it well), or it has many dependencies (if you don’t).

MariaDB replication using containers

In this blog we are going to demonstrate how to replicate a MariaDB database that runs in a Docker container (let’s call it primary) to one or more MariaDB servers that run in a Docker container (let’s call them replicas) using binary logging, a method that creates binary log files and an index that contains the record of all changes to the database (both data and structure). You can find an overview of how replication works here and you can find how to setup replication here. An example can be found in this GitHub script.

Contributions, our lifeblood

The lifeblood of MariaDB Foundation is contributions. Our trinity consists of the fundamental values of Adoption (of MariaDB Server), Openness (of the MariaDB Server codebase), and Continuity (of our operations and activities), all of which are centered around MariaDB Server. We rely on our financial sponsors to finance our activities, but the financial value of the code contributions we receive outshines the total sponsorship payments. That has been the case every year since MariaDB Server was launched.

Giving recognition to code contributions

The MariaDB Foundation has not given proper recognition to this fact, of the value of our contributions.