2015-01-13

Foundation report for 2014

2014 was a productive year for the MariaDB Foundation.

Here is a list of some of the things MariaDB Foundation employees have
accomplished during 2014:

The 3 full-time MariaDB Foundation developers have worked hard to make MariaDB better:
  • Some 260 commits
  • Some 25 reviews of code from the MariaDB community.
  • Fixed some 170 bugs and new features. For a full list, please check Jira.
  • Reported some 160 bugs.
Some of the main new features Foundation developers have worked on in 2014 are:
  • Porting and improving MariaDB on IBM Power8.
  • Porting Galera to MariaDB 10.1 as a standard feature.
  • Query timeouts (MDEV-4427)
  • Some coding and reviews of Parallel replication in MariaDB 10.1.
  • Working with code from Google and Eperi to get table space and table level encryption for InnoDB and XtraDB.
  • Allowing storage engines to shortcut group by queries (for ScaleDB) (MDEV-6080).
  • Moronga storage engine (reviews and porting help)
  • Connect storage engine (reviews and porting help)
  • Spider storage engine (merging code with MariaDB)
  • Query timeouts (MDEV-4427)
  • Merge INET6_ATON() and INET6_NTOA() from MySQL-5.6 (MDEV-4051)
  • Make "CAST(time_expr AS DATETIME)" compatible...SQL Standard) (MDEV-5372)
  • Command line variable to choose MariaDB-5.3 vs MySQL-5.6 temporal data formats (MDEV-5528)
  • Added syntax CREATE OR REPLACE to tables, databases, stored procedures, UDF:s and Views (MDEV-5491. The original TABLE code was done by Monty, other parts was done as a Google Summer Of Code project by Sriram Patil with Alexander Barkov as a mentor.
  • Upgraded the bundled Perl Compatible Regular Expression library (PCRE) to 8.34 (MDEV-5304)
  • Reduced usage of LOCK_open (MDEV-5403) (MDEV-5492) (MDEV-5587)
  • Ported patches from WebScaleSQL to MariaDB (MDEV-6039)
  • Better preallocation of memory (MDEV-7004)
  • Lock-free hash for table definition cache (MDEV-7324)
  • A lot of speed optimizations (changing mutex usage, better memory allocations, optimized bottlenecks, memory barriers etc).
The MariaDB documentation/knowledgebase:
has now 3685 articles about MariaDB and MySQL. Foundation employees added during 2014 223 new ones and did 6045 edits.

Some of the main new articles from us are:
We also have a lot of outside contributors and translators. Thanks a lot to all of you!

We also visited and talked about MariaDB at a lot of conferences:
In addition I had several talks at different companies who were moving big installations to MariaDB and needed advice.

We where also able to finalize the MariaDB trademark agreement between the MariaDB corporation and the MariaDB Foundation. This ensures that that anyone can be part of MariaDB development on equal terms. The actual trademark agreement can be found here.

On the personnel side, we were sad to see Simon Phipps leave the position as CEO of the Foundation.

One the plus side, we just had 2 new persons join the MariaDB foundation this week:
  • We are happy to have Otto Kekäläinen join us as the new CEO for the MariaDB foundation! Otto has in the past done a great work to get MariaDB into Debian and I am looking forward to his work on improving everything we do in the MariaDB foundation.
  • Vicențiu Ciorbaru has joined the MariaDB foundation as a developer. In the past Vicențiu added ROLES to MariaDB, as part of a Google Summer of Code project and he is now interested to start working on the MariaDB optimizer. A special thanks to Jean-Paul Smets at Nexedi for sponsoring his work at the foundation!
Last, I want to give my thanks to the MariaDB foundation members who made all the foundation work possible for 2014:
For 2015 we welcome a new member, Visma. Visma will be part of the foundation board and will help push MariaDB development forwards.

As the above shows, the MariaDB Foundation is not only a guarantee that MariaDB will always be an actively developed open source project, we also do a lot of development and practical work. This is however only possible if we have active members who sponsor our work!
If you are interested in helping us, either as a member, sponsor, or by giving development resources to the MariaDB foundation, please email us at foundation at mariadb.org !