Colin Charles Agenda

Last week was a bumper week in London for MySQL users, DBAs & developers. We had the Oracle MySQL Developer Day and Percona Live London 2011. Both events were sold out, bringing in a good 300+ people to each event. From what I could tell the crowds were quite unique, so thats a good 600+ people interested in MySQL in London. The death and unpopularity of MySQL is greatly exaggerated.

At Oracle’s event, we naturally only had Oracle presenters. There was Simon Deighton (Sales Manager), Tony Holmes (Sales Consultant), Luca Olivari (Sales Consulting EMEA from the MySQL days), Andrew Morgan & Mat Keep for MySQL Cluster & High Availability. The event was actually pretty good if you were a MySQL beginner to intermediate user (that seemed to be the target audience — about 1 person was playing with 5.6, and about 1% of the audience was already using 5.5). The Q&A sessions were of high calibre, and answers obviously only pointed towards Oracle products.

At Percona’s event, we had wide and varied speakers, but an absence of Oracle. The crowd were already users of MySQL who wanted to get a lot more out of the database servers. It also served five tracks, so attendees had a lot of choice and value to choose from. There was an absence of beginner-centric talks, so one could get lost quite easily if you were sent there just for training. I already said I had an awesome time there.

The way I see it is Percona Live was meant for practitioners, while the Oracle MySQL Developer Day was meant for beginners to intermediate users of MySQL (they were probably already experienced Oracle DBAs). These kind of events are both important as you get a spread spectrum of people attending conferences. You can never really please all attendees at a large event, and in many ways it is always a balance you strike at large events like the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo.

All in, London was abuzz with MySQL. Both events were out in the Tower Hill area. It is clear that MySQL and its diaspora are alive and kicking, and its quite possible the community of users are also growing.

I was at Percona Live London 2011 these past two days. Very interesting conference. Good work Peter & team — you’ve managed to gather a good 300+ people at one venue in London. So full was the venue, that during today morning’s keynote I had to sit in the spillover room and miss out on Peter calling out my name :-) (no, Stewart and I were not drinking at 9am!)

Gave my session titled Why MariaDB? (slides). Pleasantly realized that there were many new faces. Better still, everyone has heard of MariaDB in the room. More interestingly is that a bunch of people are now also using MariaDB in production!

Had to rush through the last few slides (about how open we are, the worklog, knowledgebase, etc.), but you don’t have much time in 30 minutes so you have to be succinct! The slides are attached.

Exciting news – MariaDB gets its first book!

Many years ago I read Ben Forta’s MySQL Crash Course . It is a book targeted at beginners of MySQL. Ben has now written another book, titled: MariaDB Crash Course.

Its still targeted at beginners, and covers many of the new features that are available in MariaDB up to version 5.2. I had the pleasure of pre-reading it, and did send in lots of comments to Ben, and if implemented we’ll see some stuff in there that is current even for MariaDB 5.3, like dynamic columns and more.

You can pre-order the MariaDB Crash Course which goes on sale September 23 2011 for USD$29.99 (Amazon lets you save, its $19.59 now). I’m not sure if we’ll see a Kindle version or not.

I have a bunch of notes from the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011, and I figure its about time I started blogging it. These are notes from the panel on the SkySQL Reference Architecture, led by Kaj Arno and Ivan Zoratti. The notes are raw (read their FAQ for more), and I talk a little bit about the SkySQL Configurator at the end (a tool I immediately used, and submitted some bugs/improvements for – 7 at last count, which I hear got fixed in the 0.02 release, which got pushed last night!).

There were 7 panelists. The MySQL world needs:

SkySQL Provisioning tools:

• SkySQL Manager – control and administer the SkySQL/MySQL environment
• SkySQL Configurator – configure and update SkySQL reference architecture modules
• SkySQL Tuner – analyse the configuration and prepare the packages

I did a test, and it seemed like I got binaries built in under 5 minutes. Custom configurations with a stock build. You get a 70MB binary. Hosted at http://www.enovance.com/. A lot of people never configure their my.cnf, so I think having a GUI on the web might be a good idea to help people have sensible defaults.

lovegood:skysql byte$ ls
total 143352
drwxr-xr-x    3 byte  staff       102 14 Apr 06:13 ./
drwx------@ 598 byte  staff     20332 14 Apr 06:13 ../
-rw-r--r--@   1 byte  staff  73395132 14 Apr 06:12 SkySQL-mariadb-poboffcfrm5bi054559q8iea74.tar.gz

lovegood:skysql byte$ tar -zxvpf SkySQL-mariadb-poboffcfrm5bi054559q8iea74.tar.gz
x etc/
x etc/my.cnf
x install
x packages/
x packages/xtrabackup-1.4-74.rhel5.x86_64.rpm
x packages/MySQL-client-5.5.10-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm
x packages/MySQL-server-5.5.10-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm

SkySQL is also going to have a customer advisory board, and they are starting it this week. (I don’t know any further details about this as of yet.)

The SkySQL Configurator can only get better. I expect it will do custom packages including things like Sphinx/SphinxSE, Drizzle, and other things in due time.

These were my notes from the “Where is MariaDB today?” session at the Lisbon MariaDB Developers Meeting that happened in March 2011. I just realised I hadn’t posted it; also note that it is really raw.

Where is MariaDB today?

5.3 – look at the KB article titled “MariaDB 5.3 TODO“. A lot of things are in the review state at the moment.

Sergei has all the phone home code for the server working; what is missing is a host to collect the data, and also have a website to display things (Holyfoot will work on this).

Mark Callaghan says there are at least two different implementations of group commit work now, and Percona might have a third. This is in relation to Kristian Nielsen’s work. World’s largest workload on group commit is probably at Facebook — Mark’s implementation is in the Facebook patch. Mark wants to make sure that Percona ends up using the MariaDB group commit, because having three versions would be silly. Monty believes that we need to have something that works for everyone, not just for Facebook. Its late in the game, and Percona needs to agree with either the Facebook or MariaDB version of group commit. Mark is also concerned that the group commit patch is very large and intrusive. Mark wants a public design review for group commit. Kristian agrees – we need to have a better way to do design reviews with the MariaDB community (i.e. people outside of Monty Program).

Mark is worried that there are too many optimiser changes in MariaDB which make it difficult to roll out (due to bugs). The ultimate goal is to ensure that Mark doesn’t have to maintain the Facebook patch, and its all in mainline MariaDB.

“We don’t encounter bugs in the optimiser. We see bad paths but we force it.” – Mark

The Google patch removed subqueries from the parser — they didn’t allow subqueries to be run. Subqueries aren’t largely used in large data centres. MariaDB is going to have very optimised subqueries now (in 5.3). Percona does not really hack on the optimiser and the pick up rate of Percona server is great (they just published 1,000 customers). Mark wants to ensure we can show the deployments are coming.

Mark is also concerned we only focus on the optimiser too much. The optimiser optimisations will be complete soon. He wants us to focus on InnoDB and replication. Igor said we won’t be able to do it because we don’t have specialists. Timour says we should finish the optimiser stuff that has taken several years, and the future is that we should definitely focus on InnoDB and replication.

Percona (Peter) wants to ensure that when an optimiser change is made, there is always a flag. And there is in MariaDB.

Mark will sponsor a design review for Percona on group commit. He wants one solution that both Percona & Monty Program agree on for MariaDB. Kristian is open to this as well. Monty hasn’t reviewed the patch yet, its on his TODO.

Krisitan brings up two different mindsets:

1. The MariaDB way – you do something amazing, good engineering and then deal with the merges later
2. The MySQL from Oracle is upstream, you make technical compromises, and you make a less intrusive patch

Kristian focused on the MariaDB way for the group commit patch.

Sergei Golubchik takes the stage to talk about the status of MariaDB based on MySQL 5.5

He’s doing a bzr merge then goes through all the conflicts. Then one does the tests to make sure things pass. Then do a complete diff, and understand the changes and see if things need to get fixed. Monty admits the merges are getting more complex.

At the end of the meeting, the plans for MariaDB 5.6 were formulated. There’s a lot of work coming up ahead.

As is tradition after the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo, there tends to be a storage engine summit right afterwards. This year it was expanded to also include plugins. I must graciously thank Facebook for hosting us at their campus, and giving us a rather healthy lunch, plus fueling us with all those drinks, caffeine and snacks that we needed to keep us going. While standing in the doorway, Mark (Callaghan) pointed to us that a certain other Mark (Zuckerberg) was walking into the campus, just like the rest of us.

The very raw notes are up on the Knowledgebase – Plugins & Storage Engines Summit for MySQL/MariaDB/Drizzle 2011. We definitely did not discuss anything Drizzle related, and we barely had time to focus on plugins, so the focus was still very much storage engines. There was representation from storage engine vendors: Tokutek (TokuDB), PrimeBase (PBXT/PBMS), ScaleDB, Sphinx (SphinxSE), Brazil Inc (groonga), WildGrowth (Spider), Infobright, Percona (XtraDB). Beyond the engines, there were people also representing Facebook, Wikipedia, Mail.ru, and Monty Program.

There’s a bunch of things TODO, and its probably worth commenting in the Knowledgebase if there are things that interest you. I guess next week there will be Worklog entries, mailing list posts, and connecting with folk to make sure the momentum continues on.