Nowadays, there is a common misconceptions that we don't need to optimise the technologies we use, because we can just scale out or scale up. Whereas scaling out means to add one or more instances of a technology, and scaling up means to run the technology on better...
Federico Razzoli
Enforcing strong passwords for MariaDB users
MariaDB users normally connect using a password. Weak passwords are a common security problem, especially when passwords are generated by humans. However, MariaDB comes with plugins that help validating passwords to make sure they are strong enough. This article is a...
Validating rows with CHECK constraints in MariaDB
Relational databases provide several ways to validate data. CHECK constraints are a powerful tool for in-database data validation. Their impact on performance is minimal, if any. In this article we'll discuss MariaDB support for CHECK constraints. Note that the CHECK...
MariaDB ColumnStore SQL limitations
MariaDB ColumnStore is an extremely fast and scalable solution for analytics built on MariaDB, which Vettabase supports. MariaDB ColumnStore inherits the MariaDB SQL dialect, and many MariaDB features. However, numerous MariaDB features are not available for the...
Installing MariaDB ColumnStore on Ubuntu, for production
Let's see how to install MariaDB ColumnStore (single node) on Ubuntu. Let's also prepare the system to run ColumnStore with good performance, as we should always do in production. The following steps should work on any modern Ubuntu version up to and including 24.04...
3 ways to select rows from a query result in SQL
In SQL, everything is a table. Even the results of a query are a table. This means that you can select rows and columns from the results of another query. Sometimes this allows us to do things that would otherwise be impossible. For example, joining the results of an...
Why managers should learn and use SQL
SQL is the language of data. You write a query, a single sentence in a language that resembles English, and you obtain the data you need. It's supported by the majority of databases, and the language is pretty standard. If you have a query that works on Oracle, most...
Primary keys in Data Warehouses
In my recent webinar Designing a schema for a data warehouse, I was asked a question that deserves a long answer. I recommended to use IDs generated directly in the data warehouse. In other words, even if you import customer data from a MySQL database and each...
MariaDB 11.4 LTS review: cost-based optimiser, autoconfigured SSL and more
MariaDB released a new Long Term Support version as Generally Available: 11.4. So I feel it's time to resume my ongoing project of reviewing MariaDB new versions. I didn't review recent MariaDB versions, but this doesn't mean I wanted to cease my reviews. My...
New project: Awesome MariaDB list
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....