The intention from the start was to make upgrades to newer MySQL versions trivial. We have done a lot of work to keep data formats compatible (both in the .frm files and in the storage engines); when you install a new version of MySQL things should “just work”.
For a long time this was true, until MySQL 5.0 where we had to do some data incompatible changes, like in the way some characters were sorted and how end-of-line blanks were stored in indexes.
To make the upgrade process easy, we created the ‘mysql_upgrade’ program which should detect possible incompatible tables and automatically convert data as needed. …
I’ve just pushed the last batch of changes into 5.2 tree. The most important change was renaming Maria engine to Aria (with old maria* compatibility variables). Other — smaller — changes included adding all plugins to the windows .zip distribution (sphinx and oqgraph too), building mysqld.exe with federatedx, not old federated engine, refactoring of mysql-test-run suite to support pluggable per-suite extensions, print the plugin configuration in the ./configure script, and other even smaller changes. Together with all bug fixes that 5.2 has accumulated over time it made the tree ready for the next release – 5.2.2! …
If you want to know more about MySQL and MariaDB plugins read below. Our (Andrew Hutchings and mine) book MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development was just published by Packt. As far as I know it’s the first and the only book completely dedicated to MySQL Plugin API. It covers all existing in 5.1 plugin types, from Daemon to Storage Engines, and does not shun from explaining less known or poorly understood features of the plugin API. It describes newer plugin API extensions too – such as authentication plugins and recent CREATE TABLE extension. …
Continue reading “The “MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development” book is finally published”
We rely on a network of mirrors to efficiently distribute MariaDB to the world. It would be impossible for us to distribute MariaDB without the assistance of our mirrors. Thank you!
Today we’d like to announce that thanks to the generosity of the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, mirroring MariaDB is faster and easier than ever.
If you have some extra hard drive space and spare bandwidth, please consider becoming a mirror. Instructions on how you can become an official MariaDB mirror are on the “Mirroring MariaDB” page in the AskMonty.org Knowledgebase. …
Dear MariaDB users,
MariaDB 5.1.50, a branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes, and many community patches, has been released. MariaDB: Community developed, feature enhanced, backward compatible.
For an overview of what’s new in MariaDB 5.1.50, please see the release notes.
Highlights include MariaDB 5.1.50 based on MySQL 5.1.50, includes XtraDB 5.1.49-12, and have some bug fixes in the Aria storage engine. For finer grained details, please view the changelog.
MariaDB is available in source and binary form for a variety of platforms and is available from the download pages. …
After two months of submissions, Monty Program employee review, community voting and Monty’s final decision, we are happy to announce that the Maria storage engine will henceforth be known as …
Aria!
Congratulations to Chris Tooley who suggested the name. Chris said about Aria in his submission, “Maria without the ‘M’, plus aria is a pleasant musical term.” Chris is now the proud new owner of a System 76 Meerkat net-top computer. Thanks to our good friends at System76 for providing this nifty prize.
Hopefully, in time, “Aria” will also be a pleasing database engine term. …
Recently Kostja posted two insightful blog posts about his thoughts on the currently fragmented MySQL landscape and quality of a piece of code contributed by a “community member”, which is a MySQL euphemism for a person not employed by MySQL. (Hence, the full time MySQL developers are themselves not members of their own community?)
I wanted to comment on both posts, but found out Kostja only allows logged in LiveJournal users to comment, which I am not. Since the posts were interesting enough, I suppose they deserve a comment in a new blog post like this instead. …
Continue reading “Comments on Kostja’s motivations on hacking MySQL”
For some time, we haven’t had any binary distribution on Windows. This was bad because a significant number of our downloads of earlier releases was from Windows people.
So, I’m working to change this. The first step is to revive the noinstall zip files. This isn’t too difficult, just run the scripts. In theory, at least.
Actually the build scripts didn’t work for me, but the problems with them were really minor. So I did some of the steps manually and modified the scripts a bit. Looks like it worked.
I’m now uploading the windows zip file to the mirrors. You should be able to download it from http://askmonty.org/wiki/MariaDB:Download. …