Colin Charles Agenda

This is the third time MySQL has made an entry into the Oracle Critical Patch Update Advisory service. The first time, we at Team MariaDB came up with an analysis: Oracle’s 27 MySQL security fixes and MariaDB.

Security is important to a DBA. Having vague explanations does no one any good. Even Oracle ACE Director Ronald Bradford chooses to ask some tough questions on this issue. Recently we found a bug in MySQL & MariaDB and did some responsible disclosure as well. 

Security is a big deal to distributions shipping MySQL. It comes alongside having a good, accessible bugs system. Recall a discussion a while back about possibly even replacing MySQL with MariaDB (this led to a fun discussion and a long meeting at UDS Oakland to ensure choice).

These discussions always come back. Today on the Debian mailing list, the suggestion popped back up again. I’m sure it will pop up again in October when the next CPU includes some fixes in MySQL…

What is Oracle going to do about this? Will it start being more open (not with a select few folk, but with the wider community)?

One of the things we (Team MariaDB) talked quite a bit about since we released was PBXT. It was a feature differentiation to MySQL as we shipped another storage engine. It was included in MariaDB 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3; however with our release of MariaDB 5.5, PBXT (docs in the Knowledgebase) has been deprecated and not built by default any longer.

The reason behind it is clear: PBXT is currently not under active development. We still include it in the source releases and if you would like to use it, you just have to build it. If and when development around it comes back to an active state with bugs being fixed and the engine being pushed forward, I’m sure we’ll start building it again. In the meantime, much thanks to Paul McCullagh for developing a great transactional engine.

When I was at MySQL, I took for granted that pretty much every website I used had software at the back of it that was basically MySQL. It was a nice feeling. MariaDB is a lot younger, so when I was in Paris and had to make a payment for the taxi I was sitting in, I smiled a little when I saw that Paybox Services was processing my transaction. Some might recall that Paybox Services deployed MariaDB, since the 5.2 release. It was a wonderful feeling that somewhere in that transaction, MariaDB was behind it!

Paybox wanted some features inside of MySQL 5.5 and have been holding out for MariaDB 5.5. Its kind of nice to see that today, MariaDB 5.5.22 has been released as a release candidate. It is only a matter of time before Paybox can benefit from things they’ve wanted like semi-sync replication.

Right after Percona Live Santa Clara (which MariaDB is quite present for), its worth noting there are a few more events happening on Friday, April 13, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. MariaDB will be present at 2/3 of those events.

• SkySQL & MariaDB Solutions Day – go ahead and register
• Sphinx Search Day – if you dig full-text search, you should be present so go ahead and register

The one event MariaDB won’t be present at is the Drizzle Day. That doesn’t mean you can’t attend talks across all these events though — the schedules are synced so you can move freely across events. Friday in itself is like a mini-conf, because it seems like there will be four simultaneous tracks happening.

I for one can say that I’m truly excited that MariaDB will be part of Percona Live Santa Clara. The MariaDB session list includes:

• A tutorial: Improving MySQL/MariaDB query performance through optimizer tuning by Timour Katchaounov and Sergey Petrunia. You can benefit from this even as a stock MySQL user naturally.
• MySQL Plugins – why should I bother? by Sergei Golubchik is again something that isn’t only MariaDB specific since MySQL also has a plugin architecture. I don’t know if Sergei will talk about authentication plugins as well, but I can imagine this is on the mind of many people.
• MariaDB: The 2012 edition by Colin Charles – well, this is me. You might wonder what we’ve been doing since mid-2009 having only made our first release in early-2010. We’ve achieved quite a lot in the project, so come find out why you might consider MariaDB to your alternative to MySQL. We may even have a surprise in the way of some new announcements here.
• MySQL Optimizer Standoff MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.3 by Peter Zaitsev is focused on the optimizer features between MySQL and MariaDB. MariaDB 5.3 as you might know features a lot of optimizer improvements.

The BoFs schedule has just been released, and on Wednesday evening from 9pm onwards, you can come visit Ballroom A to discuss MariaDB, help with the future roadmap as well as be filled with lots of salmiakkikossu.

We have already confirmed our acceptance of having a DotOrg booth and can’t wait till that information makes it up on the Internet.

All in all, I’m happy to be attending and speaking in Santa Clara yet again in the April timeframe. This has become somewhat of a yearly ritual. Make sure you register, and don’t forget to do a little searching to find some promo codes!

Sergey Petrunia of the MariaDB project & Monty Program.

MySQL 5.5 GA at the end of 2010. MariaDB 5.3 RC towards the end of 2011 (beta in June 2011).

MySQL 5.5 is merged to Percona Server 5.5 which included semi-sync replication, slave fsync options, atuomatic relay log recovery, RBR slave type conversions (question if this is useful or not), individual log flushing (very useful, but not many using), replication heartbeat, SHOW RELAYLOG EVENTS. About 2/3rds of the audience use MySQL 5.5 in production, with only 2 people using semi-sync replication.

MariaDB 5.3 brings replication features brings group commit in the binary log, which is merged into Percona Server 5.5. Checksums for binlog events which is merged from MySQL 5.6. Sergey goes in-depth about the group commit for the binary log. To find out a little more about MariaDB replication changes, see Replication in the Knowledgebase.

There are several implementations of group commit. Facebook started it, followed by MariaDB & Oracle. Percona 5.5 is GA so the feature is there, its not in MySQL 5.6 (yet?), and MariaDB 5.3 is where its at. Seems like the MariaDB implementation is the best so far – refer to the Facebook benchmark performed by Mark Callaghan.

Annotated RBR poses a compatibility problem. MariaDB 5.3 has annotate_rows, while MySQL 5.6 has rows_query event. They are different events. So you cannot have a MariaDB 5.3 master and a MySQL 5.6 slave at this moment. So MySQL 5.6 will have a flag to mark “ignorable” binlog events which will be merged into MariaDB and this will make binary logs compatible again.

There is now also optimized RBR for tables with no primary key.

MySQL 5.6 also has crash-safe slave (replication information stored in tables). Crash-safe master (binary log recovery if the server starts & sees the binary log is corrupted). Parallel event execution is something that is new in MySQL 5.6 which is the most important feature for Sergey.

Pre-heating: There is mk-slave-prefetch (famous quote: “Please don’t use mk-slave-prefetch on #MySQL unless you are Facebook.”). There is replication booster by Yoshinori Matsunobu. There is a Python version of mk-slave-prefetch that Facebook uses.