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Vettabase Milestones: Year 2023 in Review

by | Jan 19, 2024 | Company updates

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2023 was a fruitful year for Vettabase Ltd, so I’ve taken some time to mark the company’s progress over the last 12 months in a blog post. I think this is also the right moment to thank everyone who crossed paths with Vettabase and contributed to its prosperity.

New customers

Last year we started working with several new customers, and two of them went public about their collaboration with us. They are:

One remarkable renewal also happened in 2023. Treedom renewed their contract with us, which proved 4 years of successful work described in a case study.

We appreciate the trust that all our customers place in Vettabase, and hope to continue to take care of the customers’ database infrastructures in the future.

New partnerships

In addition to our existing partnerships with MariaDB Foundation and Treedom, we onboarded two more partners: 

MindsDB is a meta-database that connects to remote data sources (integrations) and answers SQL queries. These SQL queries can ask for predictions about the future, or other somehow missing data. For example, how many sales will be performed next year, or how the customers behaviour would change under certain conditions.

Vettabase currently maintains MindsDB integration with MySQL. We work to make integration between these technologies smoother and easier. Things we’ve done until now include:

– Make some parameters optional when you connect MindsDB to MySQL.

– Allow to use a MySQL database URI rather than specifying each parameter separately.

– Implement handling of MySQL query timeout from MindsDB, to handle circumstances where the timeout is too short, or the opposite case, when we want to set a stricter timeout for MindsDB queries.

We also look forward to doing joint partner events and creating partner content together for the benefit of our customers. 

Our first joint webinar with MindsDB will take place on January 24, 2024. We have officially started rendering services to MindsDB users willing to employ traditional databases as external data sources.

Webinars

We introduced free Vettabase webinars in April 2023 and decided to make them our regular monthly practice. Here are the links to our 2023 webinars for you to revisit:

Concepts of ProxySQL configuration for Galera cluster

MariaDB 10.11, key features overview for DBAs

Key Reasons to Upgrade to MySQL 8 or MariaDB 10.11

MySQL 8: improvements in asynchronous replication

MariaDB Temporal Tables: A Demonstration

What Database Professionals, DevOps and Others Can Learn from Flight Safety?

A first look at MariaDB 11 features and ideas on how to use them

MariaDB Security Best Practices

In 2024, we’ll continue hosting free webinars and hope to have more joint events with our partners, as I have already mentioned above.

Offline events

In October 2023, I presented at MariaDB (Un)Conference covering MariaDB stored procedures (the recording is available here). The whole event was about “shaping MariaDB future”, and I brought some suggestions about why and how stored procedures should be improved. My talk was well received, I got some questions from MariaDB Foundation members, and apparently some JIRA tasks I pointed out received some attention. I won’t stop here, and I started to write a series of blog posts on the topic. 

Amongst other talks, I found Monty’s presentation on MariaDB catalogs very interesting. I wrote a blog post about it to show how, in my opinion, catalogs use cases go well beyond the use cases that Monty seemed to have in mind.

Blog posts

In addition to two posts I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the Vettabase team authored 8 more technical blog posts in 2023. Here’s the list in reverse chronological order:

First steps with pgbackrest, a backup solution for PostgreSQL

MariaDB/MySQL: working with storage engines

MySQL and MariaDB storage engines: an overview

MySQL 8.0.33: Quick Overview

The UUID data type in MariaDB

Overview of detailed slow query logging in MySQL 8: log_slow_extra

MariaDB 10.11 LTS: New types and functions, more dynamic InnoDB configuration

A summary of MariaDB 10.10: INET4 type, RANDOM_BYTES() and more

Next year we’ll continue to blog covering the technologies we support and will probably provide more expert advice database automation which we believe is key to managing large database setups.

Interviews

In mid October, I was interviewed by The Register’s Lindsay Clark to provide insights on the recent MariaDB Corporation (a.k.a. MariaDB plc) restructuring:

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/10/19/mariadb_restructure_analysts/

In early December, DevRims Tech Talk #037 was published, which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in the principles backing our work at Vettabase:

For interview enquiries, please email in**@ve*******.com , we’re open to media placements.

Plans for 2024

This year we’re planning to blog more about database automation. Automation remains a very important aspect of Vettabase services, because it’s essential to make databases scalable and (as much as possible) error-free. Particularly, we’ll cover Ansible as our core, first-choice technology for automating database tasks. If you are interested in certain topics, feel free to propose them in the comments.

We have already mentioned that some joint activities with partners will take place in 2024. There are solid grounds for it as our new partners, MindsDB and Bytebase, offer products that are extremely useful for our customers:

  • MindDB enables AI-based predictions to whoever is able to connect a database and run SQL queries. In particular, we maintain the MySQL integration and offer support to customers who want to enable Machine Learning inside MySQL.
  • Bytebase enables a range of features that database users need out of the box, from schema versioning and schema change validations, to transparent data masking. We feel that our services perfectly complement each other.

Vettabase is working on a number of exciting projects, but they cannot be disclosed at these early stages of development. We’ll continue to improve them, and share the news in due time.

All in all, we expect 2024 to become an even more fruitful year for the Vettabase team in terms of technical webinars, blog posts, and, of course, establishing more customer and partner relationships.

All content in this blog is distributed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You can use it for your needs and even modify it, but please refer to Vettabase and the author of the original post. Read more about the terms and conditions: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

About Federico Razzoli
Federico Razzoli is a database professional, with a preference for open source databases, who has been working with DBMSs since year 2000. In the past 20+ years, he served in a number of companies as a DBA, Database Engineer, Database Consultant and Software Developer. In 2016, Federico summarized his extensive experience with MariaDB in the “Mastering MariaDB” book published by Packt. Being an experienced database events speaker, Federico speaks at professional conferences and meetups and conducts database trainings. He is also a supporter and advocate of open source software. As the Director of Vettabase, Federico does business worldwide but prefers to do it from Scotland where he lives.

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