The MariaDB Foundation has released a new plugin called MariaDB Health Checks on WordPress.org. The plugin was created by contributors who participated in the 2023 CloudFest Hackathon in Germany. MariaDB is an open source database that is popular among those who want to scale their websites. It is generally faster than MySQL and has better support for a concurrent number of connections.
The plugin helps users debug their MariaDB databases by displaying important information such as logs, locale, connections, character set and collation, and options. It also shows a graph of the number of queries and the execution time over the last 24 hours. The plugin integrates with WordPress’ Site Health feature with two checks: an end-of-life check and a check for whether Histograms have been run.
Histograms are an optimizer that can help improve MariaDB performance. The plugin enables calculation of histograms to run on WordPress tables with the click of a button under the plugin’s Tools menu. “There are a few features now and it is a good framework to add more features to in future,” said MariaDB Foundation Chief Contributions Officer Andrew Hutchings. “This is a community project and is open to suggestions and pull requests. This is a project that we at the MariaDB Foundation want to support in the future.”
MariaDB Health Checks is developed on GitHub where developers can follow the plugin’s progress, contribute to new features, and report bugs. According to Hutchings, WordPress dominates the PHP world, making it the perfect target for the plugin. “The MariaDB Foundation loves WordPress (I’m writing this post in WordPress right now) so it seemed like a logical project,” he said.
In conclusion, the MariaDB Health Checks plugin is a valuable tool for those who use MariaDB databases. It provides important information and helps users improve their database performance. The plugin is open to suggestions and contributions from the community, making it a collaborative effort that will continue to improve over time.
