MariaDB Health Checks Plugin Released on WordPress.org

Introducing the MariaDB Health Checks Plugin: Now Available on WordPress.org

We are excited to announce the release of the MariaDB Health Checks plugin on WordPress.org. This plugin is the result of the collaborative efforts of contributors who participated in the 2023 CloudFest Hackathon held in Germany. MariaDB, a widely used open-source database known for its scalability, has gained popularity among those seeking to optimize their websites. It offers faster performance than MySQL and provides excellent support for a high number of concurrent connections.

During the hackathon, Andrew Hutchings, the Chief Contributions Officer at the MariaDB Foundation, highlighted the dominance of WordPress in the PHP world and saw it as the perfect platform for the plugin’s development. As an advocate of both MariaDB and WordPress, he believed that creating a plugin to enhance the database’s functionality within WordPress was a logical step.

The MariaDB Health Checks plugin offers valuable debugging capabilities for users working with MariaDB databases. It provides essential information, such as logs, locale settings, connections, character set, collation, and various options. Additionally, it includes a graph displaying the number of queries and their execution time over the past 24 hours.

Furthermore, the plugin seamlessly integrates with WordPress’ Site Health feature by incorporating two checks. The first check examines the end-of-life status, while the second verifies whether Histograms have been executed. Histograms are optimizers that can significantly improve MariaDB’s performance. With the plugin, users can effortlessly calculate histograms for WordPress tables by clicking a button in the plugin’s Tools menu.

Andrew Hutchings expressed his enthusiasm for the project, stating, “The MariaDB Foundation is committed to supporting this community project and welcomes suggestions and pull requests for further enhancements. We see this as an ongoing initiative that will continue to evolve with the help of the community.”

Developers can track the progress of the MariaDB Health Checks plugin on GitHub, where they can also contribute new features and report any bugs encountered. Join us in enhancing the reliability and performance of MariaDB within the WordPress ecosystem.