MariaDB Foundation Newsletter – 1 November 2026

In this issue

Lead story

About 3× faster: InnoDB stops fighting itself on in-memory reads

MDEV-37992 test, one run each, AMD EPYC 9454, 48 cores. Independent verification by Jonathan Miller.

Since 10.5, InnoDB had been taking the buffer pool mutex every time it promoted a page in its LRU list, even when all the data fit in memory. On machines with many cores, that single lock became the bottleneck. The new fix moves page promotion out of the hot path: reads now only flag a page, and background sweeps that already hold the lock do the moving. Scan resistance is preserved and no new settings are needed.

Mark Callaghan reported the slowdown, Marko Mäkelä wrote the original patch, and Alessandro Vetere carried it to the version that was merged. Verified on 11.8, 12.3 and 13.1, it ships in 11.8.10, 12.3.4 and 13.1.2.

FOSDEM 2027

Call for papers open: lefred’s M-ecosystem devroom at FOSDEM 2027

Frédéric Descamps (lefred)
Host, M-ecosystem devroom

Frédéric Descamps, known across the community as lefred, is hosting the M-ecosystem devroom at FOSDEM in Brussels, the successor to the MariaDB, MySQL & Friends devroom. It brings together MariaDB, MySQL, Percona Server, VillageSQL, AliSQL and the tools around them, from database internals, replication and storage engines to connectors, proxies, cloud deployments and AI and vector search.

The call for talks is open now, and selected talks will be announced on 7 December. If you have built, tuned, broken or fixed something in the M-ecosystem, this is the room to talk about it.

Read lefred’s announcement

Another call for papers closes the next day: MySQL Belgian Days, in Brussels on 28 and 29 January, takes proposals until 30 November.

Engineering

What MariaDB engineers are building

Parallel query execution: one query, many cores

MariaDB has always run each query on a single thread. Parallel query execution changes that: the table is split into chunks from the InnoDB B-tree, several workers process the chunks at the same time, and the partial results are merged. Rex Johnston built the SQL-layer side and Oleg Smirnov the storage side. In early laptop tests, an aggregation over 100 million rows roughly halved with two workers, and some TPC-H queries ran 5 to 7 times faster. The feature is still in development, and the team hopes a first, well-tested stage ships in 2027.

Oleg Smirnov
Optimizer engineer, MariaDB

Oleg walks through it in the first episode of Inner Join, our new video series with MariaDB’s core engineers.

Read the write-up (29 Oct)

TAF: the same benchmark, three databases, one config file

TAF, the Foundation’s open source Test Automation Framework, installs MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL side by side, runs identical sysbench and HammerDB workloads against each, and saves the exact configuration in a single file so anyone can reproduce the result. It reproduced the InnoDB slowdown above and confirmed the fix, its 4.0 release passed 400 downloads in two weeks, and a front end for its change-detection results is in the works.

This month TAF also took on a new storage engine: a step-by-step guide shows how to benchmark TidesDB, an LSM-based engine that runs inside MariaDB through the TideSQL plugin.

Jonathan (Jeb) Miller
Performance engineer, MariaDB Foundation

Meet the person behind TAF in our profile of Jonathan Miller, who has spent about 27 years making databases prove how fast they are: The Man Who Benchmarks MariaDB Against the World.

Vector

Ask your docs: a RAG app on Laravel 13 and MariaDB Vector

A new hands-on tutorial builds a working “ask the docs” app with retrieval-augmented generation, using only Laravel 13 and MariaDB 12.3. It splits your markdown files into passages, stores their embeddings in a MariaDB VECTOR column with a vector index, finds the closest passages by cosine distance, and has an AI agent answer with the source files cited. It comes with a CLI command and an HTTP endpoint, and an optional section keeps embeddings on your own machine with Ollama.

Mohamed Touhami Rhaima
Full-stack developer, Gabès, Tunisia

The tutorial is by Mohamed Touhami Rhaima, the full-stack developer from Gabès, Tunisia, who contributed MariaDB Vector support to Laravel 13 itself. The full code is on GitHub.

Code on GitHub

Happy birthday

17 years of the sea lion

On 29 October 2009, MariaDB 5.1.38 went out into the world. One release, and a promise behind it: that the database so many people depended on would stay open, for everyone.

Seventeen years later, the path of stepping stones runs from that first release to today’s 13.x, and every stone on it was laid by people. Engineers who write and review the code. Contributors who send their first patch late at night. Users who file the bug report that saves someone else’s weekend. Community members who answer questions, test, teach, translate and show up at meetups. Sponsors who fund the work so it stays open.

MariaDB Server doesn’t belong to any one of us. It belongs to all of us, and that is why it is still here.

Thank you for every line of code, every bug report, every question and every answer. Here’s to the next seventeen.

India meetup

Meet MariaDB: our first India meetup, online on 12 November

India has a large and growing MariaDB community, and after Open Source India in Bengaluru we wanted a regular place to meet it. Here is a taste of what’s on the program:

Simona Aleksandrova hosts, with open time for your questions. It is made for developers, DBAs, students and contributors, whether you run MariaDB in production or want to get to know it.

This is the first in a series of MariaDB Foundation events for India this winter.

Prefer Meetup? Register there instead, or watch the teaser video.

Sponsors

Sponsor roundup: Amazic joins as Silver Sponsor

Sponsorship gives MariaDB Foundation the resources to support MariaDB Server’s openness, adoption and independence. It sustains our work with contributors, users and the wider ecosystem, helping more people build with MariaDB and take part in its future. Every sponsor, at every level, helps us carry that mission forward.

SilverAmazic joins as Silver Sponsor (20 Oct). Amazic connects software vendors with partners, developers and organizations adopting new technology, combining distribution with training, content and community events. It already distributes MariaDB Enterprise, and David Forsch, Global Director of Vendors & Alliances, calls the sponsorship “a natural next step in our relationship with the MariaDB ecosystem.” Announcement

AWSNear-zero-downtime upgrades on RDS for MariaDB (26 Oct). A new AWS Database Blog case study shows how Vestiaire Collective used Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments to upgrade its RDS for MariaDB databases with almost no downtime. Case study

Releases

Connector/J 4.0: faster, and secure by default

No MariaDB Server release landed in the second half of October; the next maintenance releases will carry the InnoDB fix above.

From MariaDB plc

Around the Ecosystem

Oracle MySQL

Percona

Elsewhere

Ecosystem Hub

Is your project in the Hub yet?

The MariaDB Ecosystem Hub brings together tools, applications, hosting services and solution stacks that work with MariaDB Server. Submissions are free, and the Foundation reviews each one. If you build or maintain something that belongs there, tell us about it.

Upcoming events

Full listing at mariadb.org/events

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