MariaDB 10.8 was released in May 2022 and I'm writing a review, as I did with MariaDB 10.6. I plan to keep doing this with every major release. Bear in mind that my reviews reflect my personal opinions. 10.8 is a short-term release, which means that the support...
Shadowserver has announced that they found over 3.6 million MySQL servers exposed to the web, following their Accessible MySQL Server Report. At Vettabase we have no way to verify their data (it would be quite surprising if we had!), but we have no reasons to think...
Versioning your code, your database structure, or your infrastructure as code, is essential. But versioning comes with a potential problem: fixing mistakes can be tricky. Here I propose solutions for the most common problems. Uncommitted changes Changes were made to...
Federico Razzoli at PHP Cambridge 2022
Federico Razzoli at FOSDEM 2022
Hashes are normally represented in a human-readable format. The easiest way to work with them is to just insert this human-readable form into a table, as a string. But that is not an efficient way to work with hashes. This article explains how to read and write hashes...
Do you remember the infamous GitLab database incident in 2017? Three backup strategies in place... but no test. When they needed to quickly restore a backup there was none. You don't want to be in that situation. Here's a high level discussion about how to test...
MariaDB, like most databases, allow to run queries that use regular expressions in the WHERE clause. While this is powerful, a problem with using a regexp in a database is that it can't take advantage of an index. The reason is simple: the query optimiser can't...
A typical question we ask new customers is: do you have proper backups in place? Some of them have some form of backups, but answer no. The others give a wrong answer. Here's a checklist of things you should have in place. Checklist If you want to have reliable,...
MariaDB implemented the WITH TIES syntax in version 10.6. This feature may not be a ground breaker, but it is useful in some cases and it increases compatibility with some other DBMSs. Let's see what it does, and what use cases it has. Some history MariaDB (just like...
