MariaDB Health Checks Plugin Now Available on WordPress.org

A new MariaDB Health Checks plugin is now available on WordPress.org, thanks to the efforts of contributors involved in the 2023 CloudFest Hackathon which took place in Germany. MariaDB is a popular open source database used by those looking to further scale their websites, as it is generally faster than MySQL with better support for a concurrent number of connections.

“At the moment it appears WordPress is dominating the PHP world, so this seemed to be the perfect target,” MariaDB Foundation Chief Contributions Officer Andrew Hutchings said about creating the plugin at the hackathon.

“The MariaDB Foundation loves WordPress (I’m writing this post in WordPress right now) so it seemed like a logical project.”

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 also 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, and 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,” Hutchings said. “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.