Colin Charles Agenda

I can’t remember why I was installing Oracle Enterprise Linux 7 on Oracle VirtualBox a while back, but I did notice something interesting. It ships, just like CentOS 7, MariaDB Server 5.5. Presumably, this means that MariaDB is now supported by Oracle, too ;-) [jokes aside, It’s likely because OEL7 is meant to be 100% compatible to RHEL7]

The only reason I mention this now is Vadim Tkachenko, probably got his most retweeted tweet recently, stating just that. If you want to upgrade to MariaDB 10, don’t forget that the repository download tool provides CentOS 7 binaries, which should “just work”.

If you want to switch to MySQL, there is a Public Yum repository that MySQL provides (and also don’t forget to check the Extras directory of the full installation – from OEL7 docs sub-titled: MySQL Community and MariaDB Packages). Be sure to read the MySQL docs about using the Yum repository. I also just noticed that the docs now have information on replacing a third-party distribution of MySQL using the MySQL yum repository.

I had quite a good time at LinuxCon North America/CloudOpen North America 2014, alongside my colleague Max Mether – between us, we gave a total of five talks. I noticed that this year there was a database heavy track – Morgan Tocker from Oracle’s MySQL Team had a few talks as did Martin MC Brown from Continuent. 

The interest in MariaDB stems from the fact that people are starting to just see it appear in CentOS 7, and its just everywhere (you can even get it from the latest Ubuntu LTS). This makes for giving interesting talks, since many are shipping MariaDB 5.5 as the default choice, but that’s something we released over 2 years ago; clearly there are many interesting new bits in MariaDB 10.0 that need attention!

Chicago is a fun place to be – the speaker gift was an architectural tour of Chicago by boat, probably one of the most useful gifts I’ve ever received (yes, I took plenty of photos!). The Linux Foundation team organised the event wonderfully as always, and I reckon the way the keynotes were setup with the booths in the same room was a clear winner – pity we didn’t have a booth there this year. 

Shortly afterwards, I headed to Paris for the CentOS Dojo. The room was full (some 50 attendees?), whom were mainly using CentOS and its clear that CentOS 7 comes with MariaDB so this was a talk to get people up to speed with what’s different with MySQL 5.5, what’s missing from MySQL 5.6, and when to look at MariaDB 10. We want to build CentOS 7 packages for the MariaDB repository (10.0 is already available with MariaDB 10.0.14), so watch MDEV-6433 in the meantime for the latest 5.5 builds.

Then there was WebExpo Prague, with over 1,400 attendees, held in various theatres around Prague. Lots of people here also using MariaDB, some rather interesting conversations on having a redis front-end, how we power many sites, etc. Its clear that there is a need for a meetup group here, there’s plenty of usage.

I wrote previously about Percona Live Santa Clara 2014, and I want to bring to your attention something Percona has done that is very nice to open source communities: have an open source appreciation day.

Its before the conference (so on Monday), and you get a choice between the CentOS Dojo (great lineup there including many from Red Hat, Monty from MariaDB, and PeterZ from Percona) or the OpenStack Today (another great lineup there). I’d split my time between both the events if time permitted, except I’m flying in on that day.

I can highly recommend going to either as registration (Free) gets you access to the expo hall & keynotes as well. That’s a saving of $75!!!

Remember to register for the conference where the discount code is still SeeMeSpeak. As a bonus, Serg and I have additional talks now, so there will be more MariaDB goodness at the conference. See you next week!

So MariaDB 10.0.3 Alpha is out. Download it and remember to provide feedback.

When you run SHOW ENGINES by default, you don’t get CassandraSE or the CONNECT engine. Make sure you do a yum install MariaDB-cassandra-engine and a yum install MariaDB-connect-engine. 

You will run into conflicts if you had an older MariaDB-CassandraSE engine (so yum remove MariaDB-CassandraSE).

Once you’ve got the packages installed, you can either install the plugin or just restart mysqld.

Happy testing!

This is just for testing purposes, but you might want to play around with MariaDB 5.5.29 coming via the CentOS 6 repositories as mentioned in this post. Please test it out and report bugs if required. The process was simple on a fresh install:

yum update
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://dev.centos.org/centos/6/mariadb/mariadb.repo
yum list mariadb\*
yum install mariadb-server mariadb
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

That’s it, it just works. It comes with MEMORY, CSV, MRG_MYISAM, BLACKHOLE, MyISAM, PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, ARCHIVE, FEDERATED, InnoDB (XtraDB) and Aria.

Remember this replaces mysql-libs, and is set to replace MySQL in your install. Here’s hoping it hits mainline CentOS soon.

Try doing yum install php53 on a RHEL 5.6/CentOS 5.6 system, and see the following:

--> Finished Dependency Resolution
php53-common-5.3.3-1.el5_6.1.x86_64 from updates has depsolving problems
  --> php53-common conflicts with php-common
Error: php53-common conflicts with php-common
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: package-cleanup --problems
                        package-cleanup --dupes
                        rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

Not pleasant right? Seems the only workaround is to issue a yum remove php php-cli php-common, watch the dependencies and reinstall everything. The only thing that seems to be missing? php53-tidy.

Restart Apache (service httpd restart). Update WordPress. If you miss on restarting the web server, it won’t detect the newer PHP install and WordPress will just show you a magical message as follows: “You cannot update because WordPress 3.2.1 requires PHP version 5.2.4 or higher. You are running version 5.1.6.”