At Vettabase, we’re delighted to announce our new project, sponsored by MariaDB Foundation: the Awesome MariaDB list on GitHub! We already interact with the MariaDB Foundation as Technology Partners, and this project is the newest outcome of our long-time friendship.
Awsome lists are GitHub repositories that contain a curated collection of quality resources concerning a specific technology. Awesome MySQL list already exists, but we agreed with the Foundation that Awesome MariaDB will be somehow different.
We analysed the problems with existing Awesome lists, which we want to solve in Awesome MariaDB. The problems, in our opinion, are as follows:
- Distinguishing MariaDB resources from MySQL resources;
- Single blobs for multiple audiences;
- The open source vs. inclusivity dilemma;
- Lists don’t age well.
Distinguishing MariaDB resources from MySQL resources
When you look for information about MariaDB, or tools for MariaDB, the first problem you’ll find is that most of the material is for MySQL. Even when a tool is “for MySQL/MariaDB”, sometimes it’s only tested with MySQL. As a consequence, you have to read the material and find out to what extent it applies to MariaDB, or try a tool and find out if it works well with MariaDB. This testing process takes time, and it can be frustrating. The Awesome MariaDB list will solve the problem by prioritising projects that truly support MariaDB, and when the support is partial, we’ll show information about what is missing.
Single blobs for multiple audiences
Another problem is that Awesome database lists are organised as a long, single file. This works well for a lot of topics, like programming languages. But databases are used by different audiences interested in different aspects. For example, configuration tuning is only interesting for DBAs and DevOps engineers, whereas ORMs are only interesting for software developers. For this reason, awesome database lists often end up being only interesting for DBAs. To address this problem, we decided to organise our repository as multiple lists for different audiences, written in different files.
To start with, we’ll cover these audiences:
- Database administrators;
- Software developers;
- Data engineers.
The open source vs. inclusivity dilemma
Some Awesome lists only include open source resources, but many readers would be interested in commercial resources as well. Others include everything, but don’t necessarily help readers to prefer open source resources where available. Awesome MariaDB list prioritises free software / open source tools, open knowledge contents, and resources available without registration. However we’ll include links to commercial materials, and we’ll indicate what is not open or free. The list itself is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
Lists don’t age well
Finally, most Awesome lists age very quickly. Maybe new links are still added, but no one notices that some of the resources are not available anymore, they become obsolete, URLs change, or something written in the list itself is not true anymore. Thanks to MariaDB Foundation sponsorship, we plan to regularly verify all the resources, in tranches.
Contributions are welcome!
If you’re a MariaDB user, probably you have something to add. Or you might spot a mistake. Please do your edits and open a pull request.
If you speak a language other than English and you know good resources in that language, please open a pull request.
We like to give proper credits, so don’t forget to add your name to the CONTRIBUTORS.md file.
Federico Razzoli
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