Colin Charles Agenda

I just got invited to this: MySQL Studio Photos @ Percona Live MySQL. I immediately signed up on the Indiegogo page for MySQL Portrait Photographs. I’m going and I’m happy to see the photographer again.

Julian Cash is an incredibly talented photographer (check out his portfolio) who for some years did some light painting at the MySQL Conference. He also did some wide angle photos. Overall my portrait photo is basically shot by Julian, and I can’t wait to get an additional one. Julian portrays Human Creativity, and he’s also an incredibly nice person. He will bring out the best in you.

If you’re going to be at Percona Live and you’re involved in the MySQL ecosystem in some way, it would be a shame not to get your photo taken by Julian. So support the cause!

I’m planning my calendar and thought I’d share what talks I’d be giving in Santa Clara in a couple of weeks for the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 and the MySQL & Cloud Database Solutions Day 2013. Its going to be a busy April 22-26 2013.

1. MariaDB Cassandra Interoperability with Sergei Petrunia on 23 April 1:20pm – 2:10pm @ Ballroom D
2. MariaDB BoF on 23 April 6:00pm – 7:00pm @ Ballroom F
3. MariaDB 10.0 & What’s New With The Project with Monty Widenius on 24 April 11:10am – 12:00pm @ Ballroom C
4. MHA: Getting started & moving past the quirks on 25 April 1:50pm – 2:40pm @ Ballroom B
5. Why MariaDB, and what is new? panel with Rasmus Johansson, Sergei Gobubchik, Ivan Zoratti at 9.30am on 26 April
6. MariaDB Galera Cluster Overview with Henrik Ingo, Max Mether at 11.15am on 26 April
7. MySQL and Cassandra Integration with Sergei Petrunia at 1pm on 26 April

Come along, use code SponsorSQL to get a 15% discount to Percona Live. The SkySQL Cloud day on the 26th is completely FREE so register now!

February is turning out to be a busy month. I’ll be giving a talk about MariaDB at the SkySQL Solutions Day in Hamburg, alongside Sergei Golubchik. This happens February 1 2013.

I’ll also be in Brussels for FOSDEM and presenting at the MySQL & Friends devroom. Here I will talk about MHA and how you can get automated MySQL failover. I’ll also be hanging out at the CentOS booth with Karanbir Singh giving away MariaDB stickers all weekend. If you’re at FOSDEM, don’t forget to sign up for the MySQL Community Dinner on Saturday night! Naturally, Friday’s beer activity is something I’ll be at too.

Busy long weekend ahead!

I had an interesting conversation with Sheeri (who I’ve known for many years, so consider this friendly banter) on Twitter about my recent blog post titled: once again, a split in events.

Disclaimer/Bias Warning: For those that don’t know me, I write this as a perspective of a community member. I was the first ever Community Engineer at MySQL, followed by being a Community Relations Manager right up till I left Sun Microsystems. I now work on MariaDB which is a branch of MySQL, so naturally we are in competition for user base. But I’m writing this as a community member at large who cares about MySQL & the ecosystem.

First of, this is a focus on the user ecosystem. I think the MySQL developer ecosystem has never been healthier than it is today – so many branches, forks, features, development trees, etc. Developer ecosystems are for another post, this is all about user ecosystems.

On events during similar timeframes

Sheeri started with calling BS on my post. Great way to start a conversation. I for one didn’t say that Oracle split the community or that Percona did so. I’m not in the job of pointing fingers. I’m just looking at past evidence: London 2012 (Percona, UKOUG), September/October 2012 (MySQL Connect San Francisco, Percona NYC), April 2011 (MySQL Conference Santa Clara, IOUG Collaborate Florida). There may be more events but I can only think of these.

I’ve heard that the April timeframe is bad for Oracle to send engineers to conferences because they have a busy release month. Yet Collaborate in Florida was ok?

Yes, MySQL may be the most popular opensource database today. This is great for the ecosystem that I am in. We can & should have many events, so I totally agree with Sheeri. But do they have to be at the same time? Do they have to ensure that attendees have to choose one or the other?

On spreading MySQL

I am happy that free events now happen in places that previously had no events, like Nairobi & Kenya. MySQL presence was almost unheard of in South America (many users, but we never made it out there to meet with the grassroots), but I’ve seen great amounts of activity there. I’ve even written about this before: a tale of two conferences. London in 2011 was awesome for MySQL all spread by a week – Oracle and Percona had 2 events and there were 2 different audiences from what I could tell.

I was at MySQL Connect this year as well as Percona Live NYC. The amount of intersection in attendees was sparse. In fact, Oracle managed to gather an interesting new crowd for Connect, so all kudos to them!

My wish as a community member (on events)

I wish to see Oracle MySQL employees show up at all events. This includes Percona Live events. I mean a talk from someone developing InnoDB, for example, would be great. It seems that the official line though is: “Oracle is not willing to help other companies’ marketing“. Fair enough. Percona Live is a great marketing event for Percona.

In the same vein I wish to see non-Oracle employees, even those from competitors, show up at Oracle MySQL events. MySQL Connect had 2 talks from Percona. That’s a good start.

I also wish that I get the best MySQL & ecosystem related content at one event. Many people can only make one event (especially when they happen during the same time at different locations). As a busy DBA, I want “the one event to learn it all”. That’s what the MySQL Conferences in Santa Clara used to do. This was a home for people to meetup once a year. This is no longer the case, it would seem.

Keeping MySQL relevant

Another wish that is unrelated to events: I wish MySQL was still spreading.

I speak to many MySQL users. From humble developers to large enterprises.

Oracle’s enemy isn’t MariaDB or Percona Server or the ecosystem at large. MySQL’s enemy is the growing use of other databases. NoSQL solutions are a popular choice; when people realize they want something relational, they don’t think about MySQL as a migration path. Pretty much every migration story I’ve seen suggests it is a migration to PostgreSQL.

Many years ago, you deployed on MySQL first. Today, is it still the first choice for the developer? Is it the second choice?

What about enterprises migrating from the Oracle database? They are well aware whom the new owners of MySQL are.

I saw this published on Josh Berkus’ blog: MySQL-to-PostgreSQL migration data from the451.com. It is worth a read.

I have had many conversations with experienced MySQL DBAs who I would consider rockstar DBAs in the Valley who are now beefing up their MongoDB knowledge. Some job offers are now asking for more than just MySQL knowledge. The naive way to look at it is if you’re getting 2-3 job offers for MySQL work per week. That is today. What about next year? I would like to put on a long term view here.

One more thing

I am truly independent in this. I want to see MySQL succeed. I need it to succeed as I am an ecosystem participant (via MariaDB).

I have heard many people call Oracle ACE/Directors Oracle apologists. I know pretty much all the Oracle ACEs as friends and respect their opinions, so in no way am I going to refer to them as apologists or shills. 

Celebrate the Oracle ACE/Director like you would the old/defunct MySQL Guilds.

Let’s work together to make the MySQL user ecosystem healthy!

Thanks to Sheeri Cabral, Giuseppe Maxia, Henrik Ingo & Ronald Bradford for pre-reading this.

This is the third time MySQL has made an entry into the Oracle Critical Patch Update Advisory service. The first time, we at Team MariaDB came up with an analysis: Oracle’s 27 MySQL security fixes and MariaDB.

Security is important to a DBA. Having vague explanations does no one any good. Even Oracle ACE Director Ronald Bradford chooses to ask some tough questions on this issue. Recently we found a bug in MySQL & MariaDB and did some responsible disclosure as well. 

Security is a big deal to distributions shipping MySQL. It comes alongside having a good, accessible bugs system. Recall a discussion a while back about possibly even replacing MySQL with MariaDB (this led to a fun discussion and a long meeting at UDS Oakland to ensure choice).

These discussions always come back. Today on the Debian mailing list, the suggestion popped back up again. I’m sure it will pop up again in October when the next CPU includes some fixes in MySQL…

What is Oracle going to do about this? Will it start being more open (not with a select few folk, but with the wider community)?

When the mysql librarian closed, I didn’t think too much about it; it was a feature I probably never used. However this month brings the end of the mysql forge. The MySQL Forge was something I worked on while I was at MySQL so I am a little sad to see it go. 

Now for a little bit of a history lesson. We wanted some kind of “forge” back in 2005, because sourceforge was all the rage then (today, you can’t even find mariadb or mongodb listed there). We didn’t want to pay the exorbitant fees associated with sourceforge, so we investigated gforge. After studying it carefully, it would only allow us to use postgresql and changing the database structure for a rapidly developing piece of code wasn’t going to work for us; and we loved eating our own dogfood (mysql).

This meant writing our own code, and thus was born the mysql forge. We requisitioned two machines (forge1, forge2) of which I cannot remember the configuration of now. The only component we didn’t write was the wiki (we used mediawiki). What did we write? The interface to worklog (which looks like it stopped being synced in august 2011), a place to share tools & code (some 288 snippets, UDFs, scripts, etc.), and a project list (which is what the forge provided – over 400 projects that have relation to working with mysql). And the wiki had a chunk of documentation (over 600 pages). 

We launched the forge sometime in april 2006, probably at the mysql users conference 2006. Apparently since then the wiki alone has had 11,236,211 page views. We hacked the wiki quite a bit, and upgrades were always a little bit of hell, but things like single sign on, SpamBlacklist, etc. had to work. 

It seems like the new community resource is just that: community resources. There doesn’t seem to be a link to the new worklog, so its difficult for the community to comment on future worklog entries. The wiki is now hosted at oracle wiki’s, and it doesn’t look like all the content made it. For example I don’t see documentation for the random query generator anywhere… And what about all the code snippets even if the project list has gone?

All in, it was great to work on code with jay pipes, lenz grimmer, dups, and the feature driver giuseppe maxia. One regret was never having opensourced the code behind the forge.

Goodbye MySQL Forge. You served the community well for over five years.