Colin Charles Agenda

I don’t normally quote The Register, but I was clearing tabs and found this article: 350 DBAs stare blankly when reminded super-users can pinch data. It is an interesting read, telling you that there are many Snowden’s in waiting, possibly even in your organisation. 

From a MariaDB standpoint, you probably already read that column level encryption as well as block level encryption for some storage engines are likely to come to MariaBD 10.1 via a solution by Eperi. However with some recent breaking news, Google is also likely to do this – see this thread about MariaDB encryption on maria-discuss. 

Google has already developed on-disk/block-level encryption for InnoDB, Aria (for temporary tables), binary logs and temporary files. The code isn’t published yet, but will likely happen soon, so clear benefits of open source development principles. 

Elsewhere, if you’re trying to ensure good policies for users, don’t forget to start with the audit plugin and roles.

Congratulations to the entire team at Red Hat, for the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL7). The release notes have something important, under Web Servers & Services:

MariaDB 5.5

MariaDB is the default implementation of MySQL in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL database project, and provides a replacement for MySQL. MariaDB preserves API and ABI compatibility with MySQL and adds several new features; for example, a non-blocking client API library, the Aria and XtraDB storage engines with enhanced performance, better server status variables, and enhanced replication.

Detailed information about MariaDB can be found at https://mariadb.com/kb/en/what-is-mariadb-55/.

This is a huge improvement over MySQL 5.1.73 currently shipping in RHEL6. I’m really looking forward to welcome more MariaDB users. Remember if you are looking for information, find it at the Knowledge Base. If you’ve found a bug, report it at Jira (upstream) or Bugzilla (Red Hat). If you want to chat with friendly developers and users, hop on over to #maria on irc.freenode.net. And don’t forget we have some populated mailing lists: maria-discuss and maria-developers.

MariaDB has plenty of mirrors to download the latest versions of MariaDB. Typically mirrors carry the last couple of releases and the current release, but what if you wanted to access something much older?

You have two resources for the complete archive:

1. http://archive.mariadb.org/ – this is the official archive, but from what I gather, it can be quite slow
2. http://downloads.skysql.com/files/MariaDB/ – SkySQL provides a complete mirror and it is very fast so I would use this instead. 

Current download archives stand at 337GB. But you can feel free to test older releases, see when things got introduced, etc. 

I’ve had this question several times when presenting and once via an internal email thread so I figure I might as well write about it: What is the default transactional engine in MariaDB 10.0? The answer is simple – it is XtraDB.

However this answer has some history: initial releases of MariaDB 10 actually shipped with InnoDB from MySQL 5.6. Only in 10.0.9 RC did the default switch back to being XtraDB. As MariaDB users previously know, XtraDB was the default InnoDB in 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and 5.5 too. As always, you can switch easily between InnoDB/XtraDB – read more in: Using InnoDB instead of XtraDB. 

How do you tell what version of InnoDB or XtraDB you are running? Simply, run: SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES LIKE 'innodb_version';

MariaDB 10.0 (read more: What is MariaDB 10.0):

The asterisk (*) denotes the default engine choice.

Why are there odd InnoDB versions from 10.0.0 – 10.0.6? I can only point this to merge oddities. storage/innobase/include/univ.i is the file which contains common definitions such as INNODB_VERSION_MAJOR, INNODB_VERSION_MINOR and INNODB_VERSION_BUGFIX. INNODB_VERSION_BUGFIX in 10.0.6 pointed to MYSQL_VERSION_PATCH which you get from the VERSION file. For XtraDB, you will also see PERCONA_INNODB_VERSION in univ.i.

So, when XtraDB is the default (10.0.9 and 10.0.10 and releases going forward) you can put in my.cnf to load InnoDB:

ignore_builtin_innodb
plugin_load=innodb=ha_innodb.so

When InnoDB is the default (10.0.8 and 10.0.7) and XtraDB was merged, you can put in my.cnf to load XtraDB:

ignore_builtin_innodb
plugin_load=innodb=ha_xtradb.so

Percona Server only became GA with 5.6.13-61.0 which was 7 Oct 2013 which explains why the MariaDB 10.0.6 beta didn’t include a XtraDB.

Percona Server only ships XtraDB (source code in storage/innobase) while MariaDB ships both InnoDB (storage/innobase) as well as XtraDB (storage/xtradb).

If you want older release information about InnoDB plugin versions, a great resource is Chris Calendar’s blog post: InnoDB Plugin Versions. I’m just glad that going forward the InnoDB version will just match the release version as you can see with 10.0.7 and later.

While at the keynote of Tomas Ulin at Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo Santa Clara 2014, he asked the audience what they were running, and most of the audience was on MySQL 5.5 while about 15% of the audience was on MySQL 5.6. This number is steadily increasing I’m sure, so one thing that becomes important is that people will probably start turning on Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs). 

As you may already know, MariaDB 10 has a different implementation of Global Transaction ID. To me, this poses a problem in a mixed use environment (or even a migration scenario). Which is why MDEV-4487 is so important: it is a feature request to allow replication from MySQL 5.6+ when GTID is enabled on the master. 

If you think the issue is important, you can vote and watch the issue on JIRA. I for one think this should be fixed for 10.0.11 or 10.0.12 and not wait for the 10.1 timeframe. Best not to comment here, focus on the JIRA request, MDEV-4487.

There are many MySQL related IRC discussion channels as the ecosystem itself grows. I join the following. Are there any that I’m missing?

Freenode (irc.freenode.net):

• #mysql – main channel for all kinds of end user MySQL related discussions (the noisiest of the lot, naturally)
• #maria – main channel for all kinds of MariaDB related discussions
• #webscalesql – for all kinds of WebScaleSQL discussions
• #percona – main channel for all kinds of Percona related discussions
• #tokutek – main channel for Tokutek discussions (TokuDB or TokuMX)
• SkySQL-specific channels: #maxscale and #mariadb-mgr

OFTC (irc.oftc.net):

• #debian-mysql – for all kinds of Debian MySQL related bits (packaging, bugs, etc.)