Colin Charles Agenda

Today I booked (well, I did that a couple of days ago) and paid for my flight ticket to the 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo. As always, its the last day for staff to get their stuff together, so I did :-)

Now, all you folk out there, might find that if you register by March 14 (I believe thats in the US timezone), you’ll save $200, so thats a total cost of only $1,295! Its at the Santa Clara Convention Center, so stay at the Hyatt if you’re wanting to hang out with MySQL’ers even after hours. Alternatively, if you’re looking for other (cheaper?) accomodation, there’s the Hilton across the road.

I’d recommend the tutorial day, especially if you’re interested in Cluster, as my friend and colleague Stewart Smith is doing the MySQL Cluster: The Complete Tutorial, in two parts, so thats one whole day of cluster related goodness. Everyone’s talking about scaling cheaply, and I think this is well worth attending if you don’t know much about Cluster.

When time permits, I’ll take a further look at the schedule, and give you my picks of what I think is going to be hot. Till then…

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysql conference & expo, mysqlconf, mysqlconference

I just built mysql-5.0-community, on my T7200 with 2GB of RAM (on Fedora Core 6), and it only took a mere:

real    7m51.127s

user    3m13.836s

sys     2m19.803s

The obligatory make test was run, and that was also pretty quick:

All 455 tests were successful.

The servers were restarted 109 times

Spent 1134.052 seconds actually executing testcases

Maybe we could have a competition to see how fast MySQL builds (under 8 minutes) and tests (under 19 minutes), something similar to the 7-second Linux kernel compile. With that it looks like 5.0.37 might make its way to the surface really soon now, since 5.0.35 was pending a release, before we canned that.

Why is MySQL Community Server 5.0.37 significant? Because it contains Jeremy Cole’s SHOW PROFILE feature. Notice how thats not just a patch any longer, its a feature, from the community, that’s been implemented in the MySQL Community Server release. Chad Miller (in Community Engineering) also extended the then patch further, and now you can also get said information via the INFORMATION_SCHEMA (look at the PROFILING table in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA).

Profiling isn’t enabled by default (check via: show variables like 'profiling';), so you’d do well to set profiling='on';. Once that is done, you can just execute SHOW PROFILE; to be greeted by the feature. Using the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database, and something like: select duration,source_function,source_file from profiling; I can see how much time MySQL takes to execute a function like the mysql_select or how long it takes to do open_tables – best of all, I can see which source file I might want to edit if need be.

I’m told this does not work on Windows, or Solaris (?), because they don’t have the getrusage() syscall, but it should probably work just fine on OS X based MySQL servers.

Technorati Tags: mysql, SHOW PROFILE, profiling, mysql community, mysql 5.0.37, timing builds

Don’t know how many of you actually have heard of, or use, Mugshot, but I just started playing with it after a long hiatus, and decided that it’s pretty cool. Something the MySQL community will probably enjoy being part of (currently, to take full advantage, you want to be a Linux or Windows XP user).

By virtue of looking for the next new community hangouts, I figure we create a MySQL Mugshot Group. And before folk wonder what Mugshot’s all about, I suggest reading the feature list. Keep in mind that Mugshot is completely open source, and its a very live social experience, in this “notification era”. Its a whole lot of fun, and from what I can tell, the signups are now open to the public so what’s keeping you?

The site has i386 RPMS for Fedora Core 6, so I thought I’d rebuild them for x86_64 as well. Will probably get some PowerPC builds going next week. I’m surprised this hasn’t made it into Extras yet, it should be fairly clean-ish (haven’t looked at the packaging myself though).

Kathy Sierra’s closing keynote at linux.conf.au 2007 was a rather interesting one. I took away a lot from it, and while I might not be giving a summary of my thoughts here, one of her slides had a quote about a fake book she co-authored, that made me chuckle a little.

“So does this mean Ruby programmers are more emo than, say, Perl programmers?

MySQL people are definitely 5000% more emo than PostgreSQL people.”

Some will recognize that from a comment made in her blog post, Announcing The Emo Programmer book. But I took another parallel to the statement, because in the past few weeks, the MySQL community have been taking the recent Enterprise/Community announcements in a rather unwelcoming way.

MySQL are not getting rid of binaries in the Community release, as Kaj has stated. Maybe we weren’t clear enough in our communication, and we’re clearly sorry. I think Kaj’s initial announcement was clear, but maybe a tabular form might be easier to understand? Keep in mind that odd numbers equate to Community releases, and even numbers equate to Enterprise releases.

5.0.27 – Community Binary & Source
5.0.28 – Enterprise Binary & Source
5.0.30 – Enterprise Binary & Source
5.0.32 – Enterprise Binary & Source
5.0.33 – Community Source (sync’ed to Enterprise 5.0.32)

So while we’re not attaching a timeframe to our releases, the above might make it easier to visualize, that the next time we release a Community edition, it will contain both binaries and source. In an ideal world, you’ll see a Community release after 2 Enterprise releases (i.e. on the 3rd release), one of which will be a source release, and the other which will be a source and binary release.

This is not a roadmap, but if we see the Community Server sources show up in January, I don’t see why we won’t see the Community Server sources & binaries showing up in March. June might see another source release, while September shows up a source & binary release. And so on…

So, if you see a binary once every six months, how is that rarely released? We’re not expecting Windows users to compile away.

In fact, the reasoning behind more frequent source releases, is to help those distributing MySQL. These are the Linux, *BSD, OS X, and other distributions that many people get their MySQL fix from. We want to make sure that with varying distribution freeze dates for releases (most good ones, ala Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. work on a six-month cycle), a new source tarball is available, and that the distributions themselves can publish it. We’re saving the infliction of pain of using BitKeeper, and taking random changesets.

Back to the question of Windows users. This is a time for Windows distributors to step up. XAMPP might be a good alternative for the learning crowd (with an easy to use installer for Apache, MySQL and PHP), and if others think we should work more closely with the project, by all means, leave a comment here or write me some email.

For those still concerned, I’d like to point out to Kaj’s Community Server recap. Don’t misunderstand point #4, as that is clearly in the Enterprise context, and its something we like to use in MySQL talks to talk about differentiation. If you’ve ever been to an overview talk, there are even clever icons that basically spell out that Enterprise customers like to spend money to save time, while Community folk enjoy spending time to save money.

To cap this all off, yes, MySQL are still providing binaries. Yes, we’ll see one Community source release, and one Community source+binary release. This will follow on with just a Community source release, and yet another Community source+binary release. Repeat, rinse.

Technorati Tags: binaries, mysql, mysql binary, mysql community server, mysql enterprise server

Stewart was hoping the MySQL MiniConf (hereinafter called mysql.conf.au) would rock. In fact, it actually did.

At any one time, we had over 60-75 people in the room. It was a standing room, with full attendance at all the talks!

As soon as I get all the slides, I’ll place it up at Forge.

Or should I say, the MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au.

There are some great talks – just check out the schedule & abstracts.

But what’s most interesting, in my opinion, is the cool Answer Guys feature. Think of it like stumping the expert, a little. The MySQL Support Team presents Arjen Lentz (MySQL trainer too!), and Morgan Tocker, for your answering pleasure, all MiniConf day.

They’ll be by the lawn (I’m not sure how UNSW is setup), thats definitely very near the room we’re having the MiniConf at (Room 6).