Colin Charles Agenda

As one decompresses from the active month that April brings to the MySQL ecosystem, its worth noting that I received a MySQL Community Award – Community Contributor of the Year 2014 award at the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2014 in Santa Clara. I was extremely happy and thankful to receive such an award and I still am. Thank you MySQL Community.

My reason for winning, now immortalised:

Colin’s list of service to the MySQL Community goes back almost 10 years. He was a community engineer starting in 2005, chaired some of the O’Reilly MySQL conferences, ran the MySQL projects for Google Summer of Code. As a partner and Chief Evangelist for Monty program, he continues to promote and grow the MySQL ecosystem. Though it’s his job, he goes above and beyond, driven by his passion for open source and MySQL.

I was amongst very good company (congratulations to all the winners). Thank you to whom nominated me, and to the committee for vetting it. Frederic wrote a nice post with a little selfie. Tomas expresses heartfelt thanks from Oracle.

Anyway, not to rest on one’s laurels – while its great to be given an award after years of being involved in the community, I will work harder in the coming months to make things better in any way I can. Thank you again, MySQL Community.

(more pics of the award: #1, #2)

Inspired by Yngve Svendsen’s post, I too think it makes absolute sense to congratulate Ubuntu on the 14.04 LTS release (some server notes – MySQL has a section dedicated to it). Ubuntu users have a lot of server choice today (that’s from all major MySQL ecosystem vendors):

• MySQL 5.5.35 ships in main. It is the default MySQL. Oracle has committed to providing updates to 5.5 throughout the LTS release cycle of Ubuntu (which is longer than the planned EOL for 5.5). This is why the grant of a Micro Release Exception (MRE).
• MySQL 5.6.16 ships in universe. 
• MariaDB 5.5.36 ships in universe.
• Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.34 ships in universe. 

Ubuntu’s pitch is being the cloud platform of choice, with OpenStack support. This explains why Percona XtraDB Cluster (the only shipping Galera Cluster variant – no upstream Codership release, and no MariaDB Galera Cluster) is critical infrastructure as its used widely in OpenStack deployments. 451Research estimates that the OpenStack distributions market is worth $82 million in 2014 and $119 million in 2015.

Press release had a choice quote from Percona CEO, Peter Zaitsev:

“We are very pleased that Percona XtraDB Cluster is included in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Many organisations that use MySQL need high availability solutions to ensure that their applications meet the expectations of their users. Percona XtraDB Cluster is an easy to use, open source solution for MySQL clustering which addresses these high availability needs. We continue to see growth in Ubuntu usage by our customers and our open source software users so we are confident that the inclusion of Percona XtraDB Cluster in Ubuntu 14.04 will help spread the adoption of cost-effective, high availability MySQL.” Peter Zaitsev, Co-Founder and CEO at Percona

With the recent Heartbleed bug, people are clearly more interested in their MariaDB/MySQL running with SSL and if they have problems. First up, you should read the advisory notes: MariaDB, Percona Server (blog), and MySQL (blog).

Next, when you install MariaDB (or a variant) you are usually dynamically linked to the OpenSSL library that the system provides. Typically on startup of MariaDB 10.0.10 on CentOS 6.5 (packages from the MariaDB repository), you can check what your status of SSL is.

MariaDB [(none)]> show variables like 'have_ssl';
+---------------+----------+
| Variable_name | Value    |
+---------------+----------+
| have_ssl      | DISABLED |
+---------------+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

This means that SSL options are compiled, but mysqld didn’t start with it. You can verify SSL is linked dynamically:

ldd `which mysqld` | grep ssl
	libssl.so.10 => /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10 (0x00007ff82d1b1000)

If you are running with SSL enabled (some documentation at MySQL) you will have different options naturally. You can do this via: /etc/init.d/mysql start --ssl. Output now changes:

MariaDB [(none)]> show variables like 'have_ssl';
+---------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+---------------+-------+
| have_ssl      | YES   |
+---------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The value NO will be displayed if the server is not compiled with SSL support. See SSL Server System Variables for more.

If you are a MySQL power user in Korea, its well worth joining the Korean MySQL Power User Group. This is a group led by senior DBAs at many Korean companies. From what I gather, there is experience there using MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server and Galera Cluster (many on various 5.5, some on 5.6, and quite a few testing 10.0). No one is using WebScaleSQL (yet?). The discussion group is rather active, and I’ve got a profile there (I get questions translated for me).

This is just a natural evolution of the DBA Dinners that were held once every quarter. Organised by OSS Korea, and sometimes funded by SkySQL, people would eat & drink, while hearing a short message about updates in the MySQL world (usually by me, but we’ve had special guests like Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon; recently we’ve seen appearances by Monty, Patrik Sallner, Michael Carney where mostly all we do then is eat & drink).

So from meetups to getting information online, in a quick fashion. Much hunger for open source in Korea, very smart people working there on services feeding the population (where some even make it outside of the local market). The future of open source in Korea is definitely very bright.

If you use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), you are always given choices of AMIs (by default; there are plenty of other AMIs available for your base-os): Amazon Linux AMI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Server and Ubuntu. In terms of cost, the Amazon Linux AMI is the cheapest, followed by SUSE then RHEL. 

I use EC2 a lot for testing, and recently had to pay a “RHEL tax” as I needed to run a RHEL environment. For most uses I’m sure you can be satisfied by the Amazon Linux AMI. The last numbers suggest Amazon Linux is #2 in terms of usage on EC2.

Anyway, recently Amazon Linux AMI came out with the 2014.03 release (see release notes). You can install MySQL 5.1.73 or MySQL 5.5.36 (the latter makes the most sense today) easily without additional repositories.

The most interesting part of the release notes though? When the 2014.09 release comes out, it would mark 3 years since they’ve gone GA with the Amazon Linux AMI. They are likely to remove MySQL 5.1 (its old and deprecated upstream). And:

We are considering switching from MySQL to MariaDB.

This should be interesting going forward. MariaDB in the EC2 AMI would be a welcome addition naturally. I do wonder if the choice will be offered in RDS too. I will be watching the forums closely

I wish more discussion happened on the internals mailing list, but if you’re interested in finding out what’s upcoming/changing in MySQL 5.7, so far the best resources I’ve found are:

• The video (1h41m is worth a watch), and blog post from Todd Farmer
• A presentation from Morgan Tocker (I wonder if we’ll see this at FOSDEM too)
• All of Morgan Tocker’s posts tagged community
• The 5.7 release notes (in particular the change log)

I like this “train” development model, but I wonder how it really syncs with the labs releases. Multi-source replication is still against 5.7.2?