Colin Charles Agenda

The problem with Twitter is that we talk about something and before you know it, people forget. (e.g. does WebScaleSQL have an async client library?) How many blog posts are there about Percona Live Santa Clara 2015? This time (2016), I’m going to endeavour to write more than to just tweet – I want to remember this stuff, and search archives (and also note the changes that happen in this ecosystem). And maybe you do too as well. So look forward to more blogs from Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016. In the meantime, here’s tweets in chronological order from my Twitter search.

• crowd filling up the keynote room for #perconalive
• beginning shortly, we’ll see @peterzaitsev at #perconalive doing his keynote
• #perconalive has over 1,200 attendees – oracle has 20 folk, with 22 folk from facebook
• #perconalive is going to be in Amsterdam sept 21-22 2015 (not in London this year). And in 2015, April 18-21 2016!
• We have @PeterZaitsev on stage now at #perconalive
• 5 of the 5 top websites are powered by MySQL – an Oracle ad – alexa rankings? http://www.alexa.com/topsites #perconalive
• now we have Harrison Fisk on ployglot persistence at facebook #perconalive
• make it work / make it fast / make it efficient – the facebook hacker way #perconalive
• a lot of FB innovation goes into having large data sizes with short query time response #perconalive
• “small data” to facebook? 10’s of petabytes with <5ms response times. and yes, this all sits in mysql #perconalive
• messages eventually lands in hbase for long term storage for disk #perconalive they like it for LSM
• Harrison introduces @RocksDB to be fast for memory/flash/disk, and its also LSM based. Goto choice for 100’s of services @ FB #perconalive
• Facebook Newsfeed is pulled from RocksDB. 9 billion QPS at peak! #perconalive
• Presto works all in memory on a streaming basis, whereas Hive uses map/reduce. Queries are much faster in Presto #perconalive
• Scuba isn’t opensource – real time analysis tool to debug/understand whats going on @ FB. https://research.facebook.com/publications/456106467831449/scuba-diving-into-data-at-facebook/ … #perconalive
• InnoDB as a read-optimized store and RocksDB as a write-optimized store — so RocksDB as storage engine for MySQL #perconalive
• Presto + MySQL shards is something else FB is focused on – in production @ FB #perconalive
• loving the woz keynote @ #perconalive – wondering if like apple keynotes, we’ll see a “one more thing” after this ;)
• “i’m only a genius at one thing: that’s making people think i’m a genius” — steve wozniak #perconalive
• Happiness = Smiles – Frowns (H=S-F) & Happiness = Food, Fun, Friends (H=F³) Woz’s philosophy on being happy + having fun daily #perconalive
• .@Percona has acquired @Tokutek in a move that provides some consolidation in the MySQL database market and takes..
• MySQL Percona snaps up Tokutek to move onto MongoDB and NoSQL turf http://zd.net/1ct6PEI by @wolpe
• One more thing – congrats @percona @peterzaitsev #perconalive Percona has acquired Tokutek with storage engines for MySQL & MongoDB – @PeterZaitsev #perconalive
• Percona is now a player in the MongoDB space with TokuMX! #perconalive
• The tokumx mongodb logo is a mongoose… #perconalive Percona will continue to support TokuDB/TokuMX to customers + new investments in it
• @Percona “the company driving MySQL today” and “the brains behind MySQL”. New marketing angle? http://www.datanami.com/2015/04/14/mysql-leader-percona-takes-aim-at-mongodb/ …
• We have Steaphan Greene from @facebook talk about @WebScaleSQL at #perconalive
• what is @webscalesql? its a collaboration between Alibaba, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter to hack on mysql #perconalive
• close collaboration with @mariadb @mysql @percona teams on @webscalesql. today? upstream 5.6.24 today #perconalive
• whats new in @WebScaleSQL ? asynchronous mysql client, with support from within HHVM, from FB & LinkedIn #perconalive
• smaller @webscalesql change (w/big difference) – lower innodb buffer pool memory footprint from FB & Google #perconalive
• reduce double-write mode while still preserving safety. query throttling, server side statement timeouts, threadpooling #perconalive
• logical readahead to make full table scans as much as 10x fast. @WebScaleSQL #perconalive
• whats coming to @WebScaleSQL – online innodb defragmentation, DocStore (JSON style document database using mysql) #perconalive
• MySQL & RocksDB coming to @WebScaleSQL thanks to facebook & @MariaDB #perconalive
• So, @webscalesql will skip 5.7 – they will backport interesting features into the 5.6 branch! #perconalive
• likely what will be next to @webscalesql ? will be mysql-5.8, but can’t push major changes upstream. so might not be an option #perconalive
• Why only minor changes from @WebScaleSQL to @MySQL upstream? #perconalive
• Only thing not solved with @webscalesql & upstream @mysql – the Contributor license agreement #perconalive
• All @WebScaleSQL features under Apache CCLA if oracle can accept it. Same with @MariaDB @percona #perconalive
• Steaphan Greene says tell Oracle you want @webscalesql features in @mysql. Pressure in public to use the Apache CLA! #perconalive
• We now have Patrik Sallner CEO from @MariaDB doing the #perconalive keynote ==> 1+1 > 2 (the power of collaboration)
• “contributors make mariadb” – patrik sallner #perconalive
• Patrik Sallner tells the story about the CONNECT storage engine and how the retired Olivier Bertrand writes it #perconalive
• Google contributes table/tablespace encryption to @MariaDB 10.1 #perconalive
• Patrik talks about the threadpool – how #MariaDB made it, #Percona improved it, and all benefit from opensource development #perconalive
• and now we have Tomas Ulin from @mysql @oracle for his #perconalive keynote
• 20 years of MySQL. 10 years of Oracle stewardship of InnoDB. 5 years of Oracle stewardship of @MySQL #perconalive
• Tomas Ulin on the @mysql 5.7 release candidate. It’s gonna be a great release. Congrats Team #MySQL #perconalive
• MySQL 5.7 has new optimizer hint frameworks. New cost based optimiser. Generated (virtual) columns. EXPLAIN for running thread #perconalive
• MySQL 5.7 comes with the query rewrite plugin (pre/post parse). Good for ORMs. “Eliminates many legacy use cases for proxies” #perconalive
• MySQL 5.7 – native JSON datatypes, built-in JSON functions, JSON comparator, indexing of documents using generated columns #perconalive
• InnoDB has native full-text search including full CJK support. Does anyone know how FTS compares to MyISAM in speed? #perconalive
• MySQL 5.7 group replication is unlikely to make it into 5.7 GA. Designed as a plugin #perconalive
• Robert Hodges believes more enterprises will use MySQL thanks to the encryption features (great news for @mariadb) #perconalive
• Domas on FB Messenger powered by MySQL. Goals: response time, reliability, and consistency for mobile messaging #perconalive
• FB Messenger: Iris (in-memory pub-sub service – like a queue with cache semantics). And MySQL as persistence layer #perconalive
• FB focuses on tiered storage: minutes (in memory), days (flash) and longterm (on disks). #perconalive
• Gotta keep I/O devices for 4-5 years, so don’t waste endurance capacity of device (so you don’t write as fast as a benchmark) #perconalive
• Why MySQL+InnoDB? B-Tree: cheap overwrites, I/O has high perf on flash, its also quick and proven @ FB #perconalive
• What did FB face as issues to address with MySQL? Write throughput. Asynchronous replication. and Failover time. #perconalive
• HA at Facebook: <30s failover, <1s switchover, > 99.999% query success rate
• Learning a lot about LSM databases at Facebook from Yoshinori Matsunobu – check out @rocksdb + MyRocks https://github.com/MySQLOnRocksDB/mysql-5.6 …
• The #mysqlawards 2015 winners #PerconaLive
• Percona has a Customer Advisory Board now – Rob Young #perconalive
• craigslist: mysql for active, mongodb for archives. online alter took long. that’s why @mariadb has https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/progress-reporting/ … #perconalive
• can’t quite believe @percona is using db-engines rankings in a keynote… le sigh #perconalive
• “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower” – Steve Jobs #perconalive
• Percona TokuDB: “only alternative to MySQL + InnoDB” #perconalive
• “Now that we have the rights to TokuDB, we can add all the cool features ontop of Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC)” – Rob Young #perconalive
• New Percona Cloud Tools. Try it out. Helps remote DBA/support too. Wonder what the folk at VividCortex are thinking about now #perconalive
• So @MariaDB isn’t production ready FOSS? I guess 3/6 top sites on Alexa rank must disagree #perconalive
• Enjoying Encrypting MySQL data at Google by @jeremycole & Jonas — you can try this in @mariadb 10.1.4 https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/mariadb-1014-release-notes/ … #perconalive
• google encryption: mariadb uses the api to have a plugin to store the keys locally; but you really need a key management server #perconalive
• Google encryption: temporary tables during query execution for the Aria storage engine in #MariaDB #perconalive
• find out more about google mysql encryption — https://code.google.com/p/google-mysql/ or just use it at 10.1.4! https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/10.1.4/ #perconalive
• Encrypting MySQL data at Google – Percona Live 2015 #perconalive http://wp.me/p5WPkh-5F
• The @WebScaleSQL goals are still just to provide access to the code, as opposed to supporting it or making releases #perconalive
• There is a reason DocStore & Oracle/MySQL JSON 5.7 – they were designed together. But @WebScaleSQL goes forward with DocStore #perconalive
• So @WebScaleSQL will skip 5.7, and backport things like live resize of the InnoDB buffer pool #perconalive
• How to view @WebScaleSQL? Default GitHub branch is the active one. Ignore -clean branches, just reference for rebase #perconalive
• All info you need should be in the commit messages @WebScaleSQL #perconalive
• Phabricator is what @WebScaleSQL uses as a code review system. All diffs are public, anyone can follow reviews #perconalive
• automated testing with jenkins/phabricator for @WebScaleSQL – run mtr on ever commit, proposed diffs, & every night #perconalive
• There is feature documentation, and its a work in progress for @WebScaleSQL. Tells you where its included, etc. #perconalive
• Checked out the new ANALYZE statement feature in #MariaDB to analyze JOINs? Sergei Petrunia tells all #perconalive https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/analyze-statement/ …

Facebook recently made opensource, osquery. It gives you operating system data via SQL queries! Its very neat, and you can test this even on MacOSX (it works on that platform & Linux). It is by far the project with the most advanced functionality, linked here in this post.

I noticed that rather quickly, there was a PostgreSQL project, called pgosquery, based on Foreign Data Wrappers with a similar idea. (apparently it was written in less than 15 minutes; so a much lower learning curve than the regular MySQL storage engine interface)

I immediately thought about an older MySQL project, by Chip Turner (then at Google, now at Facebook), called mysql-filesystem-engine. This idea was kicking around in 2008. I was intrigued by hearing about this at a talk (probably at the MySQL Conference & Expo); it’s a pity no one took this further.

On a similar tangent, did you also know that there is the option to use MySQL as storage via FUSE (see: mysqlfs)? An article by Ben Martin shows some practical examples.

At its heyday, MySQL had many storage engines (maybe around 50). Wikipedia has an incomplete list. I see some engines on that list, and think that some of these folk are also creating MongoDB backends – competition. At MariaDB we are probably shipping the most storage engines of any MySQL-based distribution, however I think we could be doing an even better job at working with upstream vendors, and figuring out how to support & augment business around it.

Another month has come to an end. If you’re looking to be updated on MariaDB content on a regular basis, don’t forget to be on Twitter (@mariadb), Facebook (MariaDB.dbms), or Google Plus (+mariadb).

There was a question on Quora – Is Facebook considering ditching MySQL in favor of MariaDB like Google did? The best answer really comes from Harrison Fisk, so I’ll leave you to it to read. The older link made its way on social media about Wikipedia_$ mv MySQL MariaDB.

MariaDB 10.0 went into beta (with the 10.0.5 release). We made a 10.0.6 release shortly afterwards to fix some bugs. One cool thing to note — the blog post from Ian Gulliver at Google about how Google is making use of MariaDB today.

The MariaDB Audit plugin is now GA – yes, you have to register to download it, but it’s worth it. There is also a webminar on this come Dec 5 which can be worth attending.

There is a new book out by Daniel Bartholomew: Getting Started with MariaDB. I fully intend to read & review it soon (you can also get this from O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf).

Navicat has announced Navicat for MariaDB for all your GUI needs on Windows, Mac or Linux. There is a free trial, or it costs in various prices for their non-commercial, standard or enterprise edition.

The MariaDB Enterprise Beta program started. I myself signed up for the beta to give it a spin. From what I gather most people that signed up qualified to give it a go. It is likely to go GA in mid-December. It is opensource software. Look at the getting started guide for more.

And in case you didn’t already notice, the Knowledge Base has had a redesign. There currently exists 3,165 articles in English licensed under the CC-BY-SA and GNU GFDL.

I happened to be awake last night so I caught the announcement via livestream for Facebook Home. I’m glad its just a system launcher. There are many (I myself on my phone use Nova Launcher), but from the demo, this is beautifully designed with a new take on the interface. The demo showed it being smoother than butter ;)

Chat heads look interesting. Some may claim it being bothersome or unintuitive, but most iOS users have this already turned on via accessibility settings assistive touch since the home button breaks far too easily. Why a little white dot when you can now make it do things for you?

I was impressed with the amount of partners on launch day. Buy-in from manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, Sony, Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE, Alcatel. Chipmaker like Qualcomm. Telcos like AT&T, Orange, EE. I can only expect this to grow of course. Gives great competition in the mobile landscape for 2013.

You see, FirefoxOS has a huge amount of partners & buy-in. I continue to be surprised that Ubuntu doesn’t have a similar page.

Am I switching from iOS as my main phone? Unlikely. I’m almost certain that many at Facebook, including Zuckerberg runs on IOS. But I will be playing with this on my secondary device (the Galaxy S3). I’m a little surprised that the April 12 launch isn’t available for the Nexus set of phones… and in Asia, the Galaxy Note form factor is popular, where did that go?

HTC First will be the first device to come with the Facebook Home system launcher as a default. I’m not sure how this is different to them applying skins and admitting that Facebook does it better. This isn’t the first time they’re playing around with a Facebook phone though.

Interesting times as Facebook has confirmed that their strategy is clearly mobile first. The fact that they built this on top of Android can’t really impress Google very much ;)

Others have also covered this well, i.e a strategy for Facebook, how this isn’t good for privacy.

Written 23 July 2012, but for some reason it never got posted. Better late than never I guess.

I tweeted (17 July 2012, 4:40am UTC+8): 

There’s an interesting link between Yahoo!, Microsoft, Bing, Facebook and Nokia. The bigger picture is competition against Google, Apple

This was literally moments after the news broke that Marissa Mayer resigned from Google to become the CEO of Yahoo!. I thought I’d expand on this link that I see.

Search is today not something that Yahoo! cares about. Its served by Bing from Microsoft. Bing is also the default on Windows Phone, the operating system that Nokia has taken a bet on (when in the USA, I use a Lumia Windows Phone and cannot complain). Search on Facebook is also powered by Bing thanks to a deal that Microsoft has with Facebook. Bing is a strong contender to Google’s search, and this space is clearly still getting investment (see how DuckDuckGo recently got VC funding too).

Yahoo! has mail that is very popular (it might still be the most popular out there). Microsoft has Hotmail. Facebook has “Facebook messages”. Nokia canned Ovi mail services. Yahoo!, Microsoft Messenger and Facebook Messenger also has instant messenger (IM) capabilities. Imagine a day when they all interconnect? It would be a straight fight against Google Chat.

Picasa is Google’s photo sharing site. Today the stream might be Google+. Yahoo! still has Flickr which is the Picasa equivalent, and for streaming? Imagine if there was a quick link to Facebook. Nokia can build in sharing to Flickr and Facebook quickly from their phones (they already have been doing this from time-to-time between phone releases including their MeeGo stint).

Videos seem to be missing from this big picture. Google has YouTube, and the rest of them have nothing with the exception of Facebook.

Maps? Nokia has got great mapping technology loaded on the Windows phone. It can supply this quite easily to everyone.

I haven’t once mentioned Apple yet. They use other search engines (and maybe the longer term strategy is something like what the Dolphin browser does: use Siri to search multiple search engines and aggregate the results so the user has no idea what search engine is being used). They have their own messenger service in iMessages. They have their own photo & video storage site – the iCloud. For maps, they are using OpenStreetMaps after having ditched Google Maps. I see Apple building their own ecosystem and going it alone.

What about developer appeal? I see many a developer hacking on a Mac OS X laptop or a Linux laptop. With the Apple ecosystem, it is obvious to develop on OSX. With the Google Android ecosystem and the rest of their toolkit, its clear you can be OS-agnostic (they support Mac, Linux, Windows). With the Microsoft/Nokia ecosystem? It seems like you need a Windows box, and that automatically turns me away quite quickly (though upcoming HTML5/CSS/JavaScript will allow more development on this platform, in an OS-agnostic sense). Facebook is OS-agnostic too.

It is an exciting time ahead. All of this is great for consumers! Ecosystems are a building and it is awesome to see alliances being built

This is me testing the WordPress Facebook plugin. It was generally missed when I could sync posts to facebook notes, but I guess this is the first step for that to happen again. Great use of a lunch hour as I wolf down some grandma-made malaysian-style chee cheong fun.