Colin Charles Agenda

You know how anecdotally we say, “in the cloud, bad nodes exist” so you should always get a baseline?

Today I ran a query (repeatedly) on sqlite3, and on two instances, I got time measured as:

Run Time: real 13.405 user 13.243332 sys 0.046667
Run Time: real 10.989 user 10.963332 sys 0.010000

This naturally skewed results I initially got for something related to MySQL/MariaDB benchmarking. It really was such that while I had 2 instances, in the same region/AZ, I had one “good” node and one “bad” node.

I think one of the big announcements that came out from the Amazon Web Services world in October 2015 was the fact that you could spin up instances of MariaDB Server on it. You would get MariaDB Server 10.0.17. As of this writing, you are still getting that (the MySQL shipping then was 5.6.23, and today you can create a 5.6.27 instance, but there were no .24/.25/.26 releases). I’m hoping that there’s active work going on to make MariaDB Server 10.1 available ASAP on the platform.

Just last week you would have noticed that Amazon has rolled out MySQL 5.7.10. The in-place upgrades are not available yet, so updating is via dump/reload or using read replicas. According to the forums, a lot of people have been wanting to use the JSON functionality.

Are you trying MySQL 5.7 on RDS? How about your usage of MariaDB Server 10.0 on RDS? I’d be interested in feedback either as a comment here, or via email.

So this year the Percona Live conference has a new name – it is the “Data Performance Conference” (presumably for a much broader appeal and the fact that Percona is now in the MongoDB world as well). And the next new thing to note? You have to go through a process of “community voting”, i.e. the speaker has to promote their talks before via their own channels to see how many votes they can get (we tried this before at the MySQL & Friends Devroom at FOSDEM; in this case, please remember you also need to create a new account and actually vote while logged in).

I hope you vote for Sergei, Monty and my proposals!

1. Using and Managing MariaDB – a tutorial, which has been referred to as The Complete MariaDB Server tutorial, I thought I will change the name up a little, in addition to the content. The most recent version of this tutorial was given at the Percona Live Conference in Santa Clara in 2015 (slides). Since then we’ve released MariaDB Server 10.1, and there’s much more new things to talk about!
2. MariaDB 10.1 – What’s New? – a talk that would have Michael “Monty” Widenius (creator of MySQL and MariaDB) and me give it together. I’ve described this as a dance, and the last time we did this was at Percona Live Amsterdam. The content will of course be new, and I am creating the slide deck this time around.
3. Databases in the Hosted Cloud – this is a pet talk. It costs some money to make, and if accepted I plan to also showcase who has better performing hosted databases. I did this at Percona Live Amsterdam 2015 (slides), but since then we’ve seen Amazon offering MariaDB Server as part of RDS, HPCloud being sunset, and also Rackspace upping their offering with High Availability Databases. More research to be done from now till then!
4. Best Practices for MySQL High Availability – this would be another tutorial, and at Percona Live Amsterdam 2015 it had the highest registered attendance (Kortney told me the day before and I removed all practicals, since 100+ people with practicals is impossible for one person to manage – slides). I think with the changes in NDBCLUSTER (recently announced at OpenWorld), the addition of tools in the MHA world (mha-helper), this should have a lot of new information (and more importantly a lot of new things to play with).
5. Choosing a MySQL HA solution today – a talk based on the above tutorial, cut short, to ensure people whom are not at tutorial day, will have solutions to think about and take home for implementation in the future.
6. MariaDB/MySQL security essentials – a talk which focuses on improvements in MariaDB Server 10.1, and MySQL 5.6/5.7, including encryption at rest, easier SSL setup for replication topologies, and even external authentication plugins (eg. Kerberos is almost ready – see MDEV-4691).
7. The MySQL Server Ecosystem in 2016 – a talk about MySQL and the forks around it, including the private trees that exist (some like the Twitter tree haven’t been updated in a while, but clearly have made inroads in giving us new features). Learn what to use, and what is the best one for your use case. 
8. MariaDB Connectors: Fast and Smart with the new protocol optimizations – a talk from Sergei Golubchik, about new protocol optimisations in MariaDB Server as well as how we optimise this from the connectors as well.
9. MariaDB 10.1 Security: Validation, Authentication, Encryption – a talk from Sergei Golubchik focusing on MariaDB 10.1 security improvements; he’s got some amazing slides on encryption that I saw at Percona Live Amsterdam, and you can see a five-minute lightning version from the meetup.

Here’s to happy voting and I hope to give at least some of these talks (if not all!).

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.