Colin Charles Agenda

It’s quite exciting to see the amount of MariaDB books out there (first GA release of software: February 2010).

From left-to-right:

1. MariaDB Crash Course (August 2011)
2. Getting Started with MariaDB (October 2013)
3. MariaDB Cookbook (March 2014)
4. Real MariaDB in Korean (April 2014). (note)

If you’re watching the NEW queue, you’ll notice that MariaDB 10.0.10 has been uploaded targeting Debian/experimental. Package description, and to think the bug was only opened on April 2nd – pretty quick turnaround.

Following my previous post on the launch, I just rolled Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on an Amazon EC2 t1.micro instance (not something you expect to run a database server on, for sure – 1 vCPU, 0.613GiB RAM). If you do an apt-cache search mysql you get 435 return result sets with the default configuration (trusty: main & universe).

If you do apt-get install mysql-server, you get MySQL 5.5. You enter the password of choice, and before you know it, MySQL is installed (a SELECT VERSION() will return 5.5.35-1ubuntu1).

Next you decide to install MariaDB. I run an apt-get install mariadb-server. It pulls in libjemalloc (for TokuDB) and I expect future releases to ship this engine by default. You enter the password, and you get a new message (as pictured).

I verify my test database that I created exists. It does. A SELECT VERSION() returns 5.5.36-MariaDB-1. The innodb_version returns 5.5.36-MariaDB-33.0.

I’m curious about MySQL 5.6 now. So I run apt-get install mysql-server-5.6. Not so straightforward. 

start: Job failed to start
invoke-rc.d: initscript mysql, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing package mysql-server-5.6 (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Setting up mysql-common-5.6 (5.6.16-1~exp1) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.19-0ubuntu6) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 mysql-server-5.6
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Looks like MySQL 5.6 is more memory hungry… I edited /etc/mysql/my.cnf to ensure that innodb_buffer_pool_size = 64M (I increased this to 128M and it worked too) was set (there was nothing in the default config) and re-ran apt-get install mysql-server-5.6 and it started. My test database was still around ;-)

I wanted to make sure that MySQL 5.6 isn’t more memory hungry just on that instance so I created yet another clean t1.micro instance and did an apt-get install mysql-server-5.6. Same error. Reported lp#1311387.

Nothing to report in particular about Percona – 5.5.34 Percona XtraDB Cluster (GPL), Release 31.1 (Ubuntu), wsrep_25.9.rXXXX. One thing is for sure – if you’re playing around with the ecosystem, installs and upgrades aren’t exactly straightforward.

As one decompresses from the active month that April brings to the MySQL ecosystem, its worth noting that I received a MySQL Community Award – Community Contributor of the Year 2014 award at the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2014 in Santa Clara. I was extremely happy and thankful to receive such an award and I still am. Thank you MySQL Community.

My reason for winning, now immortalised:

Colin’s list of service to the MySQL Community goes back almost 10 years. He was a community engineer starting in 2005, chaired some of the O’Reilly MySQL conferences, ran the MySQL projects for Google Summer of Code. As a partner and Chief Evangelist for Monty program, he continues to promote and grow the MySQL ecosystem. Though it’s his job, he goes above and beyond, driven by his passion for open source and MySQL.

I was amongst very good company (congratulations to all the winners). Thank you to whom nominated me, and to the committee for vetting it. Frederic wrote a nice post with a little selfie. Tomas expresses heartfelt thanks from Oracle.

Anyway, not to rest on one’s laurels – while its great to be given an award after years of being involved in the community, I will work harder in the coming months to make things better in any way I can. Thank you again, MySQL Community.

(more pics of the award: #1, #2)

Inspired by Yngve Svendsen’s post, I too think it makes absolute sense to congratulate Ubuntu on the 14.04 LTS release (some server notes – MySQL has a section dedicated to it). Ubuntu users have a lot of server choice today (that’s from all major MySQL ecosystem vendors):

• MySQL 5.5.35 ships in main. It is the default MySQL. Oracle has committed to providing updates to 5.5 throughout the LTS release cycle of Ubuntu (which is longer than the planned EOL for 5.5). This is why the grant of a Micro Release Exception (MRE).
• MySQL 5.6.16 ships in universe. 
• MariaDB 5.5.36 ships in universe.
• Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.34 ships in universe. 

Ubuntu’s pitch is being the cloud platform of choice, with OpenStack support. This explains why Percona XtraDB Cluster (the only shipping Galera Cluster variant – no upstream Codership release, and no MariaDB Galera Cluster) is critical infrastructure as its used widely in OpenStack deployments. 451Research estimates that the OpenStack distributions market is worth $82 million in 2014 and $119 million in 2015.

Press release had a choice quote from Percona CEO, Peter Zaitsev:

“We are very pleased that Percona XtraDB Cluster is included in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Many organisations that use MySQL need high availability solutions to ensure that their applications meet the expectations of their users. Percona XtraDB Cluster is an easy to use, open source solution for MySQL clustering which addresses these high availability needs. We continue to see growth in Ubuntu usage by our customers and our open source software users so we are confident that the inclusion of Percona XtraDB Cluster in Ubuntu 14.04 will help spread the adoption of cost-effective, high availability MySQL.” Peter Zaitsev, Co-Founder and CEO at Percona

With the recent Heartbleed bug, people are clearly more interested in their MariaDB/MySQL running with SSL and if they have problems. First up, you should read the advisory notes: MariaDB, Percona Server (blog), and MySQL (blog).

Next, when you install MariaDB (or a variant) you are usually dynamically linked to the OpenSSL library that the system provides. Typically on startup of MariaDB 10.0.10 on CentOS 6.5 (packages from the MariaDB repository), you can check what your status of SSL is.

MariaDB [(none)]> show variables like 'have_ssl';
+---------------+----------+
| Variable_name | Value    |
+---------------+----------+
| have_ssl      | DISABLED |
+---------------+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

This means that SSL options are compiled, but mysqld didn’t start with it. You can verify SSL is linked dynamically:

ldd `which mysqld` | grep ssl
	libssl.so.10 => /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10 (0x00007ff82d1b1000)

If you are running with SSL enabled (some documentation at MySQL) you will have different options naturally. You can do this via: /etc/init.d/mysql start --ssl. Output now changes:

MariaDB [(none)]> show variables like 'have_ssl';
+---------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+---------------+-------+
| have_ssl      | YES   |
+---------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The value NO will be displayed if the server is not compiled with SSL support. See SSL Server System Variables for more.