I was browsing around the Internet (don’t remember what for) and I accidentally found one cool aspect of MariaDB. There is a feedback plugin and this short post is meant to encourage you to use it!
Ok, so what it does and why should you opt-in to be spied on 🙂 It takes some information about your MariaDB server including it’s usage and it will send it to the MariaDB folks. It doesn’t send private data from your database. It sends stuff like what OS are you running, what version of various plugins, how did you tweaked the default settings and also how big and how busy is your server. Now a short list of why I turned this on:
- Why not? Doesn’t cost me anything, nothing from the data I send is secret.
- When I develop an application, I’m always happy when somebody uses it. This is an easy way how to tell developers, that they have here one happy user 🙂
- Easy way to contribute. It’s really simple to turn it on, it will help MariaDB folks make better database and doesn’t require much effort from my side.
- Selfish reason – if they see that plenty of people use MariaDB the same way I do, they will focus more on my use case 🙂
But all these data are not only available to them, they are also making some nice graphs out of it. That way, I can find out that there is at least another 27 guys running latest 10.0.10. Also I found out that there is not many reports from openSUSE folks. And that is one of the reasons to write this blog. If you are running MariaDB on openSUSE, please turn feedback plugin on to show that we have plenty of people using MariaDB 🙂
How can you turn it on? Simple, login to your database and activate the plugin using following command:
INSTALL PLUGIN feedback SONAME 'feedback';
Now just wait till your reports will show up in statistics. If I got you interested, you can read more about the plugin on MariDB website (it can report to any url, not only MariaDB one, you can use it for monitoring). While waiting, browsing already collected statistics is also interesting 😉