Colin Charles Agenda

Coming from a great MariaDB contributor, Mark, is:

1. MariaDB 5.1.44 / 5.2.0 Beta Binaries for Solaris 10 SPARC, and Debian GNU/Linux SPARC. Mark does a fabulous job of building these binaries, and he does them really quickly. If you’re on the SPARC platform, give it a go. Send some feedback, also.
2. Mark has also spent some time developing virtual machines. All you need to get started is download VirtualBox. Mark provides an OpenSolaris 0906 + MariaDB 5.1.44 VM as well as an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS + MariaDB 5.1.42 VM.
3. It is expected by the end of this week, when Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is released, Mark will upgrade the image to include MariaDB 5.1.44.

Thanks Mark! This is some fabulous work. Go give his VM’s a try and send feedback. Would you like to see any other VM’s? Any other distributions?

Gentoo
It started with Brian Evans’ github repository, some good instructions on the mailing list for Building MariaDB on Gentoo, to a request for packaging, and guess what? Its now officially in Gentoo! Thanks Brian, and Robin Johnson!

SPARC builds – Debian, Solaris
Mark has now got a MariaDB category on his blog and the interesting things for you to grab are: 5.1.42 binaries for Debian Linux/SPARC and 5.1.42 binaries for Solaris 10/SPARC. Soon, you will see 5.1.44 binaries. Thanks a lot Mark!

The aims of this kind of blog post is simple – I want to help keep the masses informed as to what’s happening with MariaDB, as a whole. There is a community growing, and MariaDB is a community project, not necessarily a Monty Program Ab baby (and we’re clear on this distinction: think of it like Canonical/Ubuntu). So, think of it as such that I’m sharing the good news, and summarising what’s been happening, to save you time.

MariaDB added to the Debian/Ubuntu wishlists
One of MariaDB’s goals is that it should be easily available for download. While we provide binaries and source at the MariaDB download page, we would love to see the binaries sitting in Linux distributions. So it is definitely good to see that it is on the Debian wishlist. It is also worth noting that Ubuntu has got it as a wishlist item as well.

MariaDB via the OpenSUSE build service
A community member, Michal Hrušecký, has decided that there will be tracking of MariaDB, and since it comes out of the OpenSUSE build service, you can find them in the unstable repository, for CentOS/RHEL 5, Fedora 11 and 12, Mandriva 2010, and OpenSUSE 11.1, 11.2, and the factory builds. All these are of course of the latest release available, which is MariaDB 5.1.42.

MariaDB for Solaris 10 and Debian on SPARC
Mark has very kindly decided to build binaries for Solaris 10 on Sparc as well as Debian GNU/Linux on Sparc. He even managed to write up a quick & dirty install guide, which should suffice for all intents and purposes. Note that these are still 5.1.41-RC releases, and you can expect to get updates soon for the released 5.1.42.

Using MariaDB with the MySQL Sandbox
The MySQL Sandbox is a great way to play with new releases of MySQL or MariaDB. Gerry Narvaja has got some tricks up his sleeve, to allow you to get going using MariaDB with the MySQL Sandbox.

MariaDB resources
A few resources if you’re new to the community:

• maria-discuss mailing list (and its archives)
• maria-developers mailing list (and its archives)
• #maria IRC logs. Don’t hesitate to join us on irc.freenode.net on #maria

Community Shoutout
Without the active community hacking on MariaDB, we would not be where we are today. So I’d like to express a word of thanks to those that are featured here in this particular post. Thank you Michal for the work with the OpenSUSE build service, thank you Mark for the Sparc related builds, and thank you the archivist for keeping the logs of #maria going. Maybe next time, I’ll attempt to feature a contributor of the newsletter, or something ;)

Hope you’ve found this useful, and the aim is to have this bi-monthly, more frequent if there is a need for it. I might even record it as a short podcast, so you can take it on the go. If you have thoughts on this, don’t hesitate to contact me, or drop me an email at colin[AT]askmonty.org.

One of the interesting things about conferences is the fact that there are usually parties associated with the conference. This usually means free food and drink. Sometimes, it usually means free t-shirts[1].

Anyway, its a great way to mingle and network, share and learn new things. So come to the OpenSolaris-MySQL-Zend OSCON Bash located at the DoubleTree Hotel (Lloyd Centre), on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 from 8pm-midnight.

Jesse Silver (excellent party planner – I found his skills amazing at the OpenSolaris Developer Summit earlier this year, in Santa Cruz, back in May), has assured us that it will be “carnivalesque”. Boxing, tricycle races, shooting galleries, pool, and an open bar :)

[1] – Good, since I’ve had to visit Target to buy some yesterday – thanks to United’s great efforts of leaving my bag in LAX and for some reason not getting it to me. Apparently, I’m not the only one in the MySQL Community lacking clothing – JetBlue has played a number on Sheeri, too.

As some of you would have recently noticed, I’ve started playing around (I can’t really say using, seeing that its still not a daily basis kind of thing for me yet) with OpenSolaris and NetBeans. Now, Sun is encouraging students to use, review, and blog about these two great products – check out the student reviews contests.

If you’ve not tried OpenSolaris 2008.05, you should probably give it a twirl. Sure, I’ve not installed it on bare metal hardware yet (I’ve been travelling so much, I’m not anywhere near machines), but it works fine inside VirtualBox. NetBeans is great if you’re writing Java, Ruby, PHP, and are connecting to a database – Connector/J for MySQL is shipped with it. If you were trying it out, take a look at the NetBeans+GlassFish+MySQL bundle.

So, students out there, take a look at the Student Reviews Contest. You have till June 6, 2008. There’s your chance to win anywhere between $100-$250 (USD?), which really means a lot of beer ;)

(and here’s hoping we run something similar when MySQL 5.1 is GA… we used to run bug finding contests where we used to give away iPod Nano’s, though I think Visa Debit Card’s are so much more useful than iPod’s…)