Colin Charles Agenda

Facebook recently made opensource, osquery. It gives you operating system data via SQL queries! Its very neat, and you can test this even on MacOSX (it works on that platform & Linux). It is by far the project with the most advanced functionality, linked here in this post.

I noticed that rather quickly, there was a PostgreSQL project, called pgosquery, based on Foreign Data Wrappers with a similar idea. (apparently it was written in less than 15 minutes; so a much lower learning curve than the regular MySQL storage engine interface)

I immediately thought about an older MySQL project, by Chip Turner (then at Google, now at Facebook), called mysql-filesystem-engine. This idea was kicking around in 2008. I was intrigued by hearing about this at a talk (probably at the MySQL Conference & Expo); it’s a pity no one took this further.

On a similar tangent, did you also know that there is the option to use MySQL as storage via FUSE (see: mysqlfs)? An article by Ben Martin shows some practical examples.

At its heyday, MySQL had many storage engines (maybe around 50). Wikipedia has an incomplete list. I see some engines on that list, and think that some of these folk are also creating MongoDB backends – competition. At MariaDB we are probably shipping the most storage engines of any MySQL-based distribution, however I think we could be doing an even better job at working with upstream vendors, and figuring out how to support & augment business around it.

I can’t remember why I was installing Oracle Enterprise Linux 7 on Oracle VirtualBox a while back, but I did notice something interesting. It ships, just like CentOS 7, MariaDB Server 5.5. Presumably, this means that MariaDB is now supported by Oracle, too ;-) [jokes aside, It’s likely because OEL7 is meant to be 100% compatible to RHEL7]

The only reason I mention this now is Vadim Tkachenko, probably got his most retweeted tweet recently, stating just that. If you want to upgrade to MariaDB 10, don’t forget that the repository download tool provides CentOS 7 binaries, which should “just work”.

If you want to switch to MySQL, there is a Public Yum repository that MySQL provides (and also don’t forget to check the Extras directory of the full installation – from OEL7 docs sub-titled: MySQL Community and MariaDB Packages). Be sure to read the MySQL docs about using the Yum repository. I also just noticed that the docs now have information on replacing a third-party distribution of MySQL using the MySQL yum repository.

I had quite a good time at LinuxCon North America/CloudOpen North America 2014, alongside my colleague Max Mether – between us, we gave a total of five talks. I noticed that this year there was a database heavy track – Morgan Tocker from Oracle’s MySQL Team had a few talks as did Martin MC Brown from Continuent. 

The interest in MariaDB stems from the fact that people are starting to just see it appear in CentOS 7, and its just everywhere (you can even get it from the latest Ubuntu LTS). This makes for giving interesting talks, since many are shipping MariaDB 5.5 as the default choice, but that’s something we released over 2 years ago; clearly there are many interesting new bits in MariaDB 10.0 that need attention!

Chicago is a fun place to be – the speaker gift was an architectural tour of Chicago by boat, probably one of the most useful gifts I’ve ever received (yes, I took plenty of photos!). The Linux Foundation team organised the event wonderfully as always, and I reckon the way the keynotes were setup with the booths in the same room was a clear winner – pity we didn’t have a booth there this year. 

Shortly afterwards, I headed to Paris for the CentOS Dojo. The room was full (some 50 attendees?), whom were mainly using CentOS and its clear that CentOS 7 comes with MariaDB so this was a talk to get people up to speed with what’s different with MySQL 5.5, what’s missing from MySQL 5.6, and when to look at MariaDB 10. We want to build CentOS 7 packages for the MariaDB repository (10.0 is already available with MariaDB 10.0.14), so watch MDEV-6433 in the meantime for the latest 5.5 builds.

Then there was WebExpo Prague, with over 1,400 attendees, held in various theatres around Prague. Lots of people here also using MariaDB, some rather interesting conversations on having a redis front-end, how we power many sites, etc. Its clear that there is a need for a meetup group here, there’s plenty of usage.

I’ve enjoyed visiting Buenos Aires once a year for the MySQLNoSQLCloud event, put together by the awesome people at Binlogic (in particular, their proprietor Santiago Lertora). It’s happening again in 2014, which by my count is the third edition, and there’s a twist: Buenos Aires on 13 & 14 November, and Cordoba on 17 November. It’s never been held in Cordoba before (like an annex event), so I think this could be extremely exciting.

If you’re looking to speak, send Santiago a note at events@binlogic.com (or leave a message here). I’ll put you in touch with him. If you’re looking to sponsor, you get attendees from all over Latin America.

Europe traditionally doesn’t have many MySQL-dedicated conferences, which is why I personally enjoy Percona Live London, now in its 2014 Edition. This year it happens November 3-4, and the call for presentations is still open – till August 17th.

The topic list is growing as the MySQL ecosystem matures: DevOps, cloud, security, case studies and what’s new are things you don’t often see. Tutorials are also welcome, of course.

Location-wise, London can’t be beat. And happening at Gloucester Road, you’re on the District/Circle/Picadilly lines to go to many fun places.

If you don’t want to present, do attend – registration is open. Early-bird (ending August 31st) conference & tutorials will set you back £425.00 and if you just want to attend the conference only, its £235.00 (VAT and fees excluded). A steal if you ask me!

See you there!

Astute readers of the release notes for MariaDB 10.0.12 will notice that there is a line that reads: performance_schema is now disabled by default.

We didn’t come to this decision by accident. Recently at the SkySQL company meeting in Budapest, we did have some time to break out into our usual working teams to talk about our daily operations. Team MariaDB had a debate about PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA and how it was left on by mistake in 10.0 GA as there was a decision to turn it off. Personally, I don’t like introducing such changes in a GA release, and there was no archive of such a discussion, so the next best thing to do was to ask the MariaDB developers and users via a post to both maria-developers and maria-discuss (3 June 2014) and to ensure that a Jira ticket existed (MDEV-6249).

But first, let’s delve into a little background information for context of this discussion. Elena started investigating a query performance issue reported on IRC, and she found that with default settings the query performance dropped tremendously with PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA enabled. We had seen that the WebScaleSQL folk had disabled PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA and there was discussion on the mailing list about a loss in performance (“Our perf testing agrees with your assessment (we see about a 5%-6% perf hit when it’s included and on, and a 2%-3% hit when it’s included but off)”).

On the maria-developers and maria-discuss lists, no one complained about having such a change. Hence the decision to disable it by default now. The alternative to this in MariaDB that comes without performance overhead is user statistics. I read a comment somewhere that there is constant evolution of PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA but the user statistics haven’t changed in a while (since MariaDB 5.2), though reliable sources tell me that more work is being done on this. Do MariaDB users want to see evolution of user statistics?

So from a user standpoint, the best way to find out if PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA is ON or OFF is to run SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'perf%';. On MariaDB 10.0.11, you will see that it is ON but on 10.0.12 you will see that it is OFF. If you are planning to enable it in a development environment, all you have to do is edit your my.cnf to have performance_schema=1 and restart your server to get to using it again.

It looks like the decision might have been the right one for the time being, looking at the recently resurfaced mysql#68514.