Colin Charles Agenda

Continuing on with the cloud theme, I think its worth noting that since mid-2014, Rackspace has offered MariaDB (as well as MySQL and Percona Server) in the cloud, as part of their Cloud Databases offering. It’s powered by OpenStack.

Now there is an additional “High Availability instance” being offered – this gives you up to two replicas per database instance, you have the ability to load balance reads across all replicas (pretty standard), but the cool thing to try out: failover is automatic. It’s not just that if the master fails, you get a new slave being the master; you get a replacement node being added, so as to ensure that your load keeps up with the traffic. These instances don’t cost much more (the higher the memory size, the cheaper it gets – 1.5% extra for something production ready, down to 7.7% more expensive for something to kick around the tires with)

There is also scheduled backups (daily incremental, weekly full) and you can specify the backup window.

Previously on Rackspace, you not only had to spin up a cloud database, but also a compute instance to access your databases. Now, they’re allowing you to get a public IP address, via an ACL.

In another post, I’ll go thru these services with the intention to update my deck and also share the results here. Have you tried or do you use Rackspace Cloud Databases?

Recently at Percona Live Amsterdam I gave a talk titled Databases in the Hosted Cloud (I’m told I got a 4/5 rating for this talk). It was before AWS re:Invent, so obviously some of the details in the talk have changed. For one, now there is also Amazon RDS for MariaDB. But there has also been other changes, i.e. HP’s Public Cloud (HP Helion Public Cloud) will sunset January 31 2016.

That’s a slide from my deck. I basically have to caution users as to what’s going on in the cloud world when it comes to their databases. And this one slide shows news reports about HP possibly wanting to exit the cloud world back in April 2015. See: HP Comes to Terms With the Cloud, HP: We’re not leaving the public cloud, and of course the HP blog post from Bill Hilf: HP Helion Strategy to Deliver Hybrid IT Continues Strong.

The tune has of course changed in October 2015: A new model to deliver public cloud. I find this to be quite sad considering they were all very gung ho about pushing OpenStack forward several OSCONs ago. I know many people who made this happen (many ex-MySQL’ers went on to HP to work on OpenStack). I can only feel for them. I guess their important work continues in OpenStack as a whole and all this ends up being part of the HP Helion private cloud.

I think its also worth noting the improvements that Percona Server 5.5 received thanks to HPCloud to make it easier to manage in the cloud:

• utility user
• enforce_storage_engine
• expanded program option modifiers
• extending secure-file-priv server option to prevent LOAD DATA INFILE/SELECT INTO OUTFILE
• restrict the number of binlog files, slow query log rotation & expiration
• and probably a whole bunch of Xtrabackup features not limited to xbcloud existing for backups to Swift

This pretty much leaves only Rackspace Cloud Databases as being a large OpenStack based offering of databases in the public cloud space, doesn’t it?

HPCloud offered 3 Availability Zones (AZs) per region, and had 2 regions – US-East (Virginia) and US-West. It’s worth remembering that US-West was the only place you could use the Relational DB MySQL service. You also got Percona Server 5.5. You enjoyed 50% off pricing while it was in public beta. 

All this is basically over. Here’s wishing the team well, a big thanks to them for helping make MySQL better and in case you’re looking for more articles to read: H-P Winds Down Cloud-Computing Project. 

Today I received about five emails with the subject: 3 Big Announcements from MariaDB. Maybe you did as well (else, read it online). October has brought on some very interest announcements, and I think my priority for the big announcements vary a little:

1. MariaDB Server is now available on Amazon RDS – you wouldn’t believe how many people ask for this, as many now deploy using Amazon Web Services (AWS), so now that it is available, I consider this to be extremely amazing. You get 10.0.17 today, and within 3-5 months of a GA, you get the next release (the docs are a work of art – read them!).
2. MariaDB Server 10.1 is now a stable GA – this is a milestone. Our last stable GA came out in March 2014. There are plenty of new features and we had a developer meeting to plan what comes in 10.2 as well. Remember to read: What is MariaDB 10.1?
3. New XAMPP with MariaDB – The new XAMPP does not ship with MySQL any longer but MariaDB Server 10.0.17. This is going to help distribution tremendously as many people use XAMPP as a development environment (it is after all the most popular PHP development environment out there). Remember to get your downloads for Windows/Linux/OSX. 

I think the above are my highlights of 3 big announcements from the MariaDB world. What are you waiting for, download it now! And remember to report bugs/feature requests to our Jira instance.

The Korean MySQL Power User Group gets a special guest speaker next weekend (Oct 31 2015 – 4pm – 4:33’s offices in Gangnam – nearest train stop is Samseong station, Line 2 – post requires Cafe Naver login) – Mark Callaghan (Small Datum, @markcallaghan, and formerly High Availability MySQL). I’ve been to many of their meetups, and I think this is a great opportunity for many DBAs to learn more about how Mark helps make MySQL and MongoDB better for users at Facebook. I’m sure he’ll also talk about RocksDB.

After that, as usual, there will be a DBA Dinner. This time the tab gets picked up by OSS Korea. See you next Saturday – Halloween in Seoul will have added spice!

Last week we had the MySQL Meetup with MariaDB Developers in Amsterdam, which went on easily for about 3.5 hours. Thanks to all for listening (these were lightning talks, not with a strict 5 minute clock with Q&A thrown in), and Daniël van Eeden for organising this at the eBay offices (whom kindly provided pizza, beer and soft drinks as well). We had many talks, and I’ve managed to put up most of the slides into a Google Drive folder, so feel free to access the bucket.

1. How is the MariaDB sausage made? by Rasmus Johansson covers how MariaDB Server gets made from an engineering standpoint
2. An inside look at the MariaDB restaurant by Daniel Bartholomew covers how MariaDB Server gets released
3. ANALYZE for statements by Sergei Petrunia
4. Data at Rest Encryption in MariaDB 10.1 by Sergei Golubchik (HTML presentation so will prompt a download for you to view in the browser)
5. Cool MariaDB Plugins by Colin Charles
6. Passwordless login with unix auth_socket by Otto Kekäläinen
7. InnoDB in MariaDB 10.1 by Jan Lindström
8. PCRE Regular Expressions in MariaDB by Alexander Barkov
9. MaxScale by Massimiliano Pinto
10. Overview of failover handling in the MariaDB Java Connector by Diego Dupin
11. Profile Guided Optimization by Axel Schwenke
12. MariaDB Server in Docker by Kolbe Kegel
13. Systemd by Dan Black (there were no slides, and the work was being pushed into 10.1, so the crowd got to see svoj come up with his laptop, and Dan made the commit by hitting the Enter key. IIRC, the commit was 20c2ae39db3dd0ec4c337a9b0bd2bf4481b61e49)
14. Engine Independent Table Statistics including Histograms by Sergei Petrunia

Georg Richter had prepared a presentation but decided not to give it, since we already had quite a lot of talks and discussion throughout the sessions. If you’re interested in MariaDB Connectors, the presentation is worth a read.

Thanks again to Daniël van Eeden and Jean-François Gagné whom really helped get this stuff going.

P/S: for some pictures, I live tweeted them:

Standing room only for @mysql NL meetup group with #mariadb developers talking today @mariadb pic.twitter.com/Hwnu1HxrDY

— Colin Charles (@bytebot) October 12, 2015

The @MySQL NL meetup with #mariadb folk – yes it's a lot of learning today @mariadb pic.twitter.com/UD9gWnly64

— Colin Charles (@bytebot) October 12, 2015

When the questions get serious, we see @mariadb @montywi talk too — @mysql NL meetup #mariadb pic.twitter.com/Qv4k84XZ0S

— Colin Charles (@bytebot) October 12, 2015

Next week, all the MariaDB Server developers will descend to Amsterdam for the developer’s meeting. As you know the meeting is open to all interested parties, so we hope to see you in Amsterdam Tuesday Oct 13 – Thursday Oct 15. The schedule is now online as well.

In addition to that, Monday Oct 12 2015, there is also a meetup planned with the MySQL User Group NL. As the organiser Daniël van Eeden wrote, this is a one of a kind meetup: “This is a very unique event, it is not often possible to find so many MariaDB developers together and speaking about what they work on.”

Yes, we’re doing it lightning talk style (ok, not strictly, 5 minutes), but everyone will talk about something they’re working on or passionate about that you don’t find in MySQL. I understand that there will be pizza and beverages too.

All in, a packed week in Amsterdam, and here’s to focusing on the MariaDB Server 10.2 release cycle.