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Not many developers know about savepoints in relational databases. Even less of them know when to use them. It’s not their fault: I can’t remember seeing a good explanation of this feature. Let’s try to clarify this lesser-known functionality. In this article I’m using MariaDB syntax. But the concepts are

In some situations, an application needs to run a single logical transaction that involves multiple database technologies: in our example, they’ll be MariaDB and PostgreSQL. This is not an optimal scenario and I’m not recommending to design systems in this way. But it’s simply a situation that you might have

How do you represent information like this in a database? There are many ways to do that. The most common is to split dates into three different columns, each of which will be NULL when it doesn’t have a specific value.But this makes dates harder to validate for the database,

Hierarchical and networked data appears everywhere in modern databases: organisational charts, product category trees, dependency graphs, and even transport networks. Applications need to retrieve this data to draw a chart, find out whom a certain employee reports to, or find the routes that connect two train stops. Storing and querying

In the first part of this series, we deployed a 3-node MariaDB Galera Cluster on Ubuntu 24.04. While a 3-node topology provides the best fault tolerance, sometimes you need a simpler setup – for example, a two-node cluster with a lightweight arbitrator to maintain quorum without running a full third

At Vettabase, we’re starting a new blog series on High Availability (HA) with focus on MariaDB Galera Cluster. This series will be a collection of hands-on guides, each tackling one practical topic: from installation, configuration, and adding or removing nodes, to backups, upgrades, and schema changes. Our goal is simple:

I see a lot of problems with database schemas: missing indexes, wrong types, tables used like an spreadsheet… but all these problems are widely known. An often overlooked problem is inconsistency. Let me explain how you should guarantee database consistency, and how inconsistency is making your life more sad than

Years ago, it was extremely common to store user-uploaded images and other multimedia contents in a database. This practice became less common over time, but I still hear questions like: would it be a bad idea to store images in our database? Or, more specifically: how bad would it be

MariaDB released a new Long Term Support version as Generally Available: 11.8. I always review MariaDB LTS versions once they’re GA, so it’s time to write a new review. Support and timeline MariaDB 11.8 is the latest Long Term Support version (LTS). The first Generally Available release is 11.8.2, released on 4

You have a beautiful application, but a page is slow. After some investigation, you find out that a query is unexpectedly slow, ruining user experience and causing frustration for you. It is a simple query with a WHERE clause and nothing else. You tried to build an index with all