Colin Charles Agenda

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.

If you’ve been busy and haven’t registered yet, remember that early-bird pricing ends on 31/03/2011. From April 1-10, you’ll have to pay USD$100 more. A discount code for use (I think you save 20-25%): mys11fsd.

We’re full up in terms of the schedule. People are still asking for an opportunity to speak, and there are still opportunities in the Products & Services track. Please contact Yvonne Romaine at yromaine@oreilly.com for more information on this.

Might I also suggest that if you want to speak and there’s no longer an opportunity, you submit a five-minute talk for the Ignite MySQL event. Even though submissions are now closed, contact Brian Aker — he’ll try and help make some magic happen for you.

Don’t forget you can also lead a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session. While it is not a talk, you can still gather like-minded folk and talk about things over pizza & beer (which has always been a popular combination in previous years).

If you’re looking for a new job, don’t forget the Career Zone. There are some great companies participating, so that’s another good reason to come.

Conferences are all about networking. While not enabled by default, I suggest you manually go and turn on access to the Attendee Directory, so you can write messages to people you want to meet, have chats with, and so on.

A quick update on a few keynotes that the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011 managed to recently close:

• The opening keynote, The State of the Dolphin, given by none other than Tomas Ulin, who is currently the VP of the MySQL Engineering team at Oracle. I am told that this is not just a “what’s new” and “what’s coming up”, as there will also be a Q&A session with an analyst, customer, and Tomas. You must not miss this on Tuesday morning at 9am, 12th April 2011.
• On Thursday at 9.30am, we have The Next Decade in Data Management, a keynote given by Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. More and more I see people using Hadoop/Hbase alongside their MySQL installs, so I think this talk is a must-see.

Early bird registration ends March 15 2011. What are you waiting for? Procrastination will cost you!

Don’t forget to follow the conference via social media: Facebook, Twitter.