As a general purpose database, it’s easy to be distracted by countless possibilities and requests for improvements. But it’s significant to note that it’s in the interest of the users that MariaDB is focusing on what’s important. Case in point: Peter Zaitsev, who shared his views of the splendidly wonderful features in MariaDB 11, noted he was very impressed by the recent MariaDB Focus, “combining implementing features important for modern developers, such as Vector Search, and ongoing work to enhance and preserve performance, important for deployments at scale”.
Billionaire controversy cancelled
Diego Dupin of MariaDB Plc showed some concrete use cases of using an LLM with MariaDB, sharing that MariaDB support in some frameworks is already live, while others (such as Langchain) just waiting for Diego’s pull requests to be accepted.
MariaDB Attendance: 90 people
Roman Nozdrin of MariaDB Plc gave a talk on Ascending to New Heights: Discover What ColumnStore Can Really Do for You. A good overview of the latest state of ColumnStore!
AWS: Thanks a million!
Our MariaDB Day event was much less controversial, and definitely not cancelled. Close to the University, people could pop in during the Saturday. We had a harmonious round-up of presenters from our sponsors, from our community, from MariaDB Plc, as well as home-grown presentations from the MariaDB Foundation staff.
MariaDB does well at Amazon RDS, validating our value proposal
To me, this is validation that MariaDB truly is the future of MySQL, like we boldly claim on our flyers at our FOSDEM booth.
“MariaDB is the future of MySQL”
Sergei Golubchik, Chief Architect at MariaDB Corporation, had an information-packed talk on the newest MariaDB releases. I highly recommend you to browse through his 17 slides – it’s a great overview of the MariaDB 11.8 release going RC in February and GA early May. It has about 60 features on top of the previous LTS, MariaDB 11.4. Keep your eyes open for our upcoming announcement!
Otto Kekäläinen of Amazon AWS presented a contribution with HTTP 301 Redirect as its role model, called Server-initiated instant failover in MariaDB. The starting point was MDEV-34009 “Add instant, obligatory, server-initiated failover mechanism to MariaDB Client/Server Protocol”. While that MDEV is in the state of “Won’t fix”, Otto has fixed it and describes how to use it in his slides. The discussion (which you can follow on YouTube) at the end of the presentation describes some of the controversy of the MDEV, which illustrates why it’s in a Won’t fix status and not part of MariaDB right now. But the beauty of Open Source is that it can still be used, based on Otto’s fix as documented in this MariaDB Day presentation. Thanks, Otto!
I’m also pleased to note some of the observations Tarus shared on stage. As expected, Amazon won’t reveal details, but we deduced we are doing very well in comparison to rivals MySQL and PostgreSQL. “Of all the open source RDBM databases, we are seeing market increase and interest in MariaDB” – “Our idea in beginning was that people wanted an option to MySQL. But what is happening in the MariaDB community is that they are going well beyond what MySQL is doing.”
MariaDB has no shackles. MariaDB has the Oracle compatibility mode, enabling migration off Oracle Database while retaining Oracle Database specific syntax, such as PL/SQL.
Peter Zaitsev of Percona noted our claim in our booth, upon which friendly banter ensued both on LinkedIn and in real life.
Focus, focus, focus – as desired by the community
Vicențiu Ciorbaru, MariaDB Foundation described how to Launch Your Open Source Career. Given that his own “First Steps in Contributing to MariaDB” (part of the title) was with Google Summer of Code many summers ago, he is in a unique position to do so. Watch it! And browse his PDF.
Brussels during the first weekend of February is a hotbed of Open Source. The weather might not be hot, in contrast to the discussions in the corridors and rooms of the ULB university. The hottest topic expected – boycotting the presentation of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey – didn’t really happen. He cancelled.
Focus on Vectors
We showcased our focus on vectors in three presentations: Sergei Golubchik helped us get to know MariaDB Rocket-Fast Native Vector Search (it’s in MariaDB Server 11.7 onwards, and in MariaDB Enterprise Server 11.4 onwards; for details, see the slides).
MariaDB remains compatible. Abandoning Oracle’s MySQL comes at little cost in time and effort, case in point being sub-five-minute on-stage migration of Cantamen’s production billion-query-a-day MySQL installation to MariaDB, at last year’s FOSDEM fringe event.
Jags Ramnarayan, of SkySQL shared how to build GenAI-powered apps with MariaDB’s vectors and SkySQL’s AI Agents, including an impressive Internet Movie Database based demo of LLM-assisted translation of human language to SQL.
Kristian Nielsen of MariaDB Foundation gave another great talk on MariaDB replication with the subtitle Ease-to-use or easy-to-abuse? Again, I recommend the PDF where Kristian moves freely from the topmost abstraction level of achieving performance, stability, and ease of use to the most technical details needed to illustrate his points. I like his simple claims that performance is ease-of use, and stability is ease of use. In fact, why don’t you watch his presentation on YouTube. Or any other of the presentations linked here, for that matter.
Focus on the roadmap
Let’s start from the sponsors. Where would be a better starting point than Amazon AWS? I promised to introduce Tarus Balog of AWS by saying “thanks a million [€]”, given that Amazon has now for two years been a Diamond Sponsor at 500k€ a year. Due to technical hassle, I missed it on stage – so let me compensate now in writing. Thanks a million, AWS, thanks Tarus, and thanks to our former AWS Board member Sirish Chandrasekaran and our current Jignesh Shah!
Focus on Security
Why? MariaDB has a future. MariaDB is innovating and continuously implementing lots of desirable functionality that MySQL lacks, including proper and performant Vector support, and lots of feature differentiation accumulated over the past 15 years.
Focus on Functionality
We had numerous interactions with our community members, for which we are very grateful. Let this picture of me with Red Hat’s MariaDB package maintainer Michal Schorm be a symbol for this.
Nikita Malyavin of MariaDB Plc presented on When a client and a server are just a PARSEC apart. PARSEC stands for Password Authentication using Response Signed with Elliptic Curve and uses salted passwords, key derivation, extensible password storage format, and both server- and client-side scrambles. An audience question caused a discussion also on pepper. On slide 19 of the PDF, you will learn how to configure zero-config SSL (pun intended). TL; DR: If you use Connector/C, you don’t need to configure anything – but you do need to enable SSL if you’re on Connector/J (sslMode=verify-full) or Connector/Node.js (ssl: true). No configuration needed on the server.
How to contribute
MariaDB remains fast. Over the years, databases grow slower and slower, including MySQL. Not so: MariaDB. The extensive performance testing done by Mark Callaghan corroborates this.
All in all, we were super happy about our MariaDB Day. Thank you to everyone who came to meet us, also at the MariaDB Stand at FOSDEM!
Discussions
Tarus Balog of Amazon noted that everybody he had been talking to at Fosdem have said they can’t come for the whole MariaDB Day, but they will come for vector search: “It is really nice to see this kind of excitement for an open source project.”
Thank you, all participants!
Back from Brussels! With a bit of time to reflect, I’d like to share the aftertaste from our MariaDB Day, our very own FOSDEM Fringe Event. Prepare for an information-packed blog entry with links to the presentations, including live recordings and often the slide decks.
