Colin Charles Agenda

I miss a proper database related newsletter for busy people. There’s so much happening in the space, from tech, to licensing, and even usage. Anyway, quick tab sweep.

Paul Vallée (of Pythian fame) has been working on Tehama for sometime, and now he gets to do it full time as a PE firm, bought control of Pythian’s services business. Pythian has more than 350 employees, and 250 customers, and raised capital before. More at Ottawa’s Pythian spins out software platform Tehama.

Database leaks data on most of Ecuador’s citizens, including 6.7 million children – ElasticSearch.

Percona has launched Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL 11. This means they have servers for MySQL, MongoDB, and now PostgreSQL. Looks very much like a packaged server with tools from 3rd parties (source).

Severalnines has launched Backup Ninja, an agent-based SaaS service to backup popular databases in the cloud. Backup.Ninja (cool URL) supports MySQL (and variants), MongoDB, PostgreSQL and TimeScale. No pricing available, but it is free for 30 days.

Comparing Database Types: How Database Types Evolved to Meet Different Needs

New In PostgreSQL 12: Generated Columns – anyone doing a comparison with MariaDB Server or MySQL?

Migration Complete — Amazon’s Consumer Business Just Turned off its Final Oracle Database – a huge deal as they migrated 75 petabytes of internal data to DynamoDB, Aurora, RDS and Redshift. Amazon, powered by AWS, and a big win for open source (a lot of these services are built-on open source).

MongoDB and Alibaba Cloud Launch New Partnership – I see this as a win for the SSPL relicense. It is far too costly to maintain a drop-in compatible fork, in a single company (Hi Amazon DocumentDB!). Maybe if the PostgreSQL layer gets open sourced, there is a chance, but otherwise, all good news for Alibaba and MongoDB.

MySQL 8.0.18 brings hash join, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and more interestingly, HashiCorp Vault support for MySQL Keyring. (Percona has an open source variant).

Percona Live Europe Amsterdam Day 1 was a bunch of fun, especially since I didn’t have to give a talk or anything since my tutorial was over on Day 0.

At lunch, I realised that there are a lot more fringe events happening around Percona Live… and if you’ve seen how people do “tech weeks”, maybe this is what the event ends up being – a show, plus plenty of focused satellite events. FOSDEM in the open source world totally gets this, and best of all, also lists fringe events (see example from 2019).

So, Thursday evening gets a few fringe events, a relatively short train ride away:

• ClickHouse Paris Meetup 2019
• ProxySQL Technology Day Ghent

Anyway, what was Day 1 like? Keynotes started the morning, and I did make a Twitter thread. It is clear that there is a lot of talk amongst companies that make open source software, and companies in the ecosystem that somehow also derive great value from it. Some look at this as the great cloud vendors vs open source software vendors debate, but this isn’t necessarily always the case – we’ve seen this as Percona’s model too. And we’ve seen cloud companies contribute back (again, just like Percona). Guess this is a topic for a different post, because there are always two sides to this situation…

It is also clear that people want permissive open source licenses over anything source available. If you’re a CxO looking for software, it would be almost irresponsible to be using critical software that is just source available with a proprietary license. After all, what happens when the company decides to ask for more money? (Companies change ownership too, you know).

It is probably clear the best strategies are the “multi” (or hybrid) strategies. Multiple databases, multiple clouds, and going all in on open source to avoid vendor lock-in. Of course, don’t forget that open source software also can have “vendor lock-in” – always look at the health metrics of a project, vs. a product. We’re lucky in the MySQL ecosystem that we have not just the excellent work of Oracle, but also MariaDB Corporation / MariaDB Foundation and also Percona.

MySQL 8.0 adoption is taking off, with about 26% of the users on it. Those on MySQL 5.6 still seem to be on it, and there has been a decrease in 5.7 use to grow that 8.0 pie. It isn’t clear how these stats are generated (since there is no “phone home” functionality in MySQL; also the MariaDB Server variant doesn’t get as much usage as one would like), but maybe it is via download numbers?

Anyone paying any attention to MySQL 8 will know that they have switched to a “continuous delivery model”, also known as, you get new features in every point release. So the latest 8.0.18 gets EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and while we can’t try it yet (not released, and the documentation isn’t updated), I expect it will be fairly soon. I am eager to try this, because MariaDB Server has had ANALYZE since 10.1 (GA – Oct 2015). And it wasn’t long ago that MySQL received CHECK constraints support (8.0.16). Also the CLONE plugin in 8.0.17 warrants some checking/usage!

Besides all the hallway chats and meetings I did manage to get into a few sessions… Rakuten Intelligence talked about their usage of ProxySQL, and one thing was interesting with regard to their future plans slide – they do consider group replication but they wonder what would replace their custom HA software? But most importantly they wonder if it is stable and which companies have successfully deployed it, because they don’t want to be the first. Question from the floor about Galera Cluster came up, and they said they had one app that required XA support – looks like something to consider once Galera 4 is fully baked!

The PXC–8 talk was also chock full of information, delivered excellently, and something to try soon (it wasn’t quite available yesterday, but today I see a release announcement: Experimental Binary of Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0).

I enjoyed the OpenCorporates use case at the end too. From the fact that for them, being on-premise would be cheaper than the cloud, how they use ProxySQL, Galera Cluster branch Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), and ZFS. ZFS is not the most common filesystem for MySQL deployments, so it was interesting to see what could be achieved.

Then there was the Booking.com party and boy, did they outdo themselves. We had a menu, multi-course meal with wine pairings, and a lot of good conversation. A night wouldn’t be complete without some Salmiakkikossu, and Monty sent some over for us to enjoy.

Food at the Hilton has been great too (something I would never really want to say, considering I’m not a fan of the hotel chain) – even the coffee breaks are well catered for. I think maybe this has been the best Percona Live in terms of catering, and I’ve been to a lot of them (maybe all…). I have to give much kudos to Bronwyn and Lorraine at Percona for the impeccable organisation. The WiFi works a charm as well. On towards Day 2!

The call for papers for Percona Live Santa Clara 2018 was extended till January 12 2018. This means you still have time to get a submission in.

Topics of interest: MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL & other open source databases. Don’t forget all the upcoming databases too (there’s a long list at db-engines).

I think to be fair, in the catch all “other”, we should also be thinking a lot about things like containerisation (Docker), Kubernetes, Mesosphere, the cloud (Amazon AWS RDS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud SQL, etc.), analytics (ClickHouse, MariaDB ColumnStore), and a lot more. Basically anything that would benefit an audience of database geeks whom are looking at it from all aspects.

That’s not to say case studies shouldn’t be considered. People always love to hear about stories from the trenches. This is your chance to talk about just that.

I’ve always enjoyed the Percona Live Europe events, because I consider them to be a lot more intimate than the event in Santa Clara. It started in London, had a smashing success last year in Amsterdam (conference sold out), and by design the travelling conference is now in Dublin from September 25-27 2017.

So what are you waiting for when it comes to submitting to Percona Live Europe Dublin 2017? Call for presentations close on July 17 2017, the conference has a pretty diverse topic structure (MySQL [and its diverse ecosystem including MariaDB Server naturally], MongoDB and other open source databases including PostgreSQL, time series stores, and more).

And I think we also have a pretty diverse conference committee in terms of expertise. You can also register now. Early bird registration ends August 8 2017.

I look forward to seeing you in Dublin, so we can share a pint of Guinness. Sláinte.

It was a big April if you’re in the MySQL ecosystem, so am looking forward to other events that have different focus and a different base, so to speak. See you at:

• rootconf – May 11-12 2017 – Bangalore, India. My first Rootconf was last year, and it was a great event; I look forward to going there again this year, to talk about capacity planning for your databases. If you register with this link you get a 10% discount.
• Open Source Data Center Conference – May 16-18 2017 – Berlin, Germany. I’ve enjoyed my trips to OSDC in the last few years, and they’re on their last tickets now – so register if you plan to go!

GNU/Linux distributions matter, and Debian is one of the most popular ones out there in terms of user base. Its an interesting time as MariaDB Server becomes more divergent compared to upstream MySQL, and people go about choosing default providers of the database.

The MariaDB Server original goals were to be a drop-in replacement. In fact this is how its described (“It is an enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL”). We all know that its becoming increasingly hard for that line to be used these days.

Anyhow in March 2016, Debian’s release team has made the decision that going forward, MariaDB Server is what people using Debian Stretch get, when they ask for MySQL (i.e. MariaDB Server is the default provider of an application that requires the use of port 3306, and provides a MySQL-like protocol).

All this has brought some interesting bug reports and discussions, so here’s a collection of links that interest me (with decisions that will affect Debian users going forward).

Connectors

• MySQL ODBC in Stretch – do follow the thread
• [debian-mysql] final decision about MySQL r-deps needed / cleaning up the MySQL mess – yes, the MySQL C++ connector is not the same as the MariaDB Connector/C. And let’s not forget the things that depend on the C++ connector, i.e. libreoffice-mysql-connector. Rene Engelhard started this excellent thread with questions that could do with answers.

MariaDB Server

• Don’t include in stretch – bug#837615 – this is about how MariaDB Server 10.0 (note the version – this matters) should be included, but MySQL 5.6 shouldn’t be.
• MariaDB 10.1? – note that Otto Kekäläinen, CEO of the MariaDB Foundation, says the plan is to skip MariaDB Server 10.1 and go straight to MariaDB Server 10.2. As of this writing, MariaDB Server 10.2 is in its first beta released 27 Sep 2016, so are we expecting a few more betas before the release candidate? History shows there were four betas for 10.1 and one release candidate, while there were three betas and two release candidates of 10.0. There is no response here as to what is gained from skipping MariaDB Server 10.1, but one can guess that this has to do with support cycles.
• default-mysql-client forces removal of mysql-server* and mysql-client* – bug#842011 – bug reporter is a bit hostile towards the package team, but the gist is that “mariadb is NOT a drop-in replacement for mysql.” Users are bound to realise this once Debian Stretch gets more mainstream use.
• [debian-mysql] Bug#840855: Bug#840855: mysql-server: MySQL 5.7? – questioning what happens to MySQL 5.7, and this is really a call to action – if you disagree, email the security and release teams now not after Stretch is released! Quoting Clint Byrum, “The release and security teams have decided that MySQL will live only in unstable for stretch due to the perceived complications with tracking security patches in MySQL.”
• [debian-mysql] About packages that depend on mysql-* / mariadb / virtual-mysql-* – in where we find the API-incompatible libmysqlclient, naming conventions, and more.