MariaDB 10

[willemgrooters]

The currrent version of MariaDB on VMS is 5.5 (the basic offfspring of MySQL 5.5) but this is quite out-of-date. Current open source programs often require MariaDB 10, more precise: 10.6. Is there a chance that VSI - or any C/C++ guru - will port this to VMS?
(I have no knowlegde of DB internals or C/C++, so I cannot do this)

[arne_v]

According to Mark Berryman in some old comp.os.vms thread then newer MariaDB versions require a newer C++ standard than what the traditional VMS C++ compiler supports, so we have to wait for CLang on VMS x86-64.

[marty.stu]

The currrent version of MariaDB on VMS is 5.5 (the basic offfspring of MySQL 5.5) but this is quite out-of-date. Current open source programs often require MariaDB 10, more precise: 10.6. Is there a chance that VSI - or any C/C++ guru - will port this to VMS?
(I have no knowlegde of DB internals or C/C++, so I cannot do this)

Willem,

Generally, Arne is right. Until a newer C++ standard is available on OpenVMS, it is impossible to port MariaDB 10.x. As soon as Clang reaches maturity on OpenVMS, we will definitely look at porting MariaDB 10.

[neilrieck]

At this point in time I would gladly accept mariadb-5 for no other reason than to install the client software so that I can connect to a remote database (MariaDB or MySQL) from DCL. As I understand it, a C11 compatible C compiler is not required to build mariadb-5

[mberryman]

I have reported a couple of bugs on the C compiler. I can't build MariaDB until they are resolved. I'll be trying again once the next update is released.

[issinoho]

Do we know what the current set of blockers are to achieving this?

[mberryman]

I have been able to release the clients for MariaDB 10 but the server requires support for thread local storage which I have not yet been able to completely work around. I do not know how high on the priority list this is for the C++ compiler. The server also mixes C++ calls for threads and pthread calls for threads.

The server also makes extensive use of signals, which are thread-specific on Unix but process-wide on VMS. (Perhaps that is why we do not have pthread_kill?). Part of the issue here is that threads are started all over the place which makes it difficult to instantiate anything VMS-specific to address these issues.

[arne_v]

I suspect that TLS will eventually show up. It is needed by more than MariaDB.

In the mean time what about a 5.x build for VMS x86-64? Possible?

[neilrieck]

At this point in time I would gladly accept mariadb-5 for no other reason than to install the client software so that I can connect to a remote database (MariaDB or MySQL) from DCL. As I understand it, a C11 compatible C compiler is not required to build mariadb-5

Sorry for replying to my own post, but VSI has already presented some alternatives that I previously missed:

(1) this open source offering ( https://vmssoftware.com/products/libmariadb/ ) provides MariaDB client-only software for all OpenVMS platforms except VAX. With it you should be able to connect to a remote MySQL or MariaDB server running on any other system (we are currently running several MariaDB-10 databases on AlmaLinux which are accessed from our primary business system running on OpenVMS)

(2) this open source offering ( https://vmssoftware.com/products/mariadb/ ) provides a MariaDB-5 client and server for OpenVMS Itanium. If you still need AXP support then try Mark Berryman's site: https://theberrymans.com/php_kits/
Note: Mark's site also contains a MariaDB-10 client that I was able to link against from C on x86-64

ps. More than 5-years ago I wrote some C routines that link against Mark's MariaDB-5 client libraries. Then I created some uglier code which allows me to call these routines from VMS-BASIC (the linker process is now bizarre and includes SSL libraries). That work was never intended to be used for more than 12-months but it is now 2025 and the stuff is still in production. Even though we will probably replace that BASIC program with something written in Python (where interfacing with MariaDB is child's play), I got my my temporary BASIC-C stuff working with both libmariadb (from VSI) and Mark's newer MariaDB-10 client (on both Itanium and x86-64)