Colin Charles Agenda

I just wanted to collect the links of the Google and MariaDB relationship. These were all items in September 2013.

The Register: Google swaps out MySQL, moves to MariaDB – this was largely based on a presentation at SLAC by Jeremy Cole (slides). Same news was picked up by ReadWrite (with a different angle naturally), Google Waves Goodbye To MySQL In Favor Of MariaDB.

If you’re more audio inclined, there was great discussion on the This Week in Google podcast: checkout episode 216.

This is a followup to my early post a month ago titled: MariaDB replaces MySQL in RHEL 7 (lots of stuff in the comments). It’s clear that MariaDB’s role is in Software Collections, which is new in RHEL.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes Red Hat will switch from Oracle MySQL to MariaDB, reports.

Sean Michael Kerner has a video (and writeup) with Denise Dumas, RHEL team leader, who talks about Software Collections, MariaDB, and how we’re all friendly (Red Hat + SkySQL + MariaDB). There will be 3 years of support for Software Collections. Indemnification applies as always, its just support cycle per collection is reduced. New MySQL ships in Software Collections too. Its available for 6.4/6.5 (probably as a GA as its beta now), and will be in RHEL7 too.

Also, if you’re using OpenShift, there is now a new cartridge: the OpenShift MariaDB Cartridge.

Timing is everything. I wrote about how MySQL man pages were silently relicensed away from the GPL. It was picked up by a lot of sites: Hacker News, Slashdot, LWN, and probably more. That led to a bug report in Debian (#712730) to complain that MySQL is no longer compliant with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). That prompted Norvald Ryeng who’s active in Debian (thanks Oracle!) to file MySQL bug #69512. Almost immediately Oracle said it was a bug, where Yngve Svedsen pointed to the buildsystem: “This is indeed a bug, where the build system erroneously and silently started pulling in man pages with the wrong set of copyright headers.” That then prompted Tomas Ulin to write about how The MySQL Man Pages ARE Available under the GPL. Case closed, many on Hacker News attributed it to Hanlon’s razor. Most news sites updated it with the bug, and The H also wrote an article: Oracle bug accidentally removes GPL licence from MySQL man pages.

We learned about this issue from MariaDB Jira and spent some time looking at it. We looked at the MySQL source tarballs, and looked at 5.5.30/5.5.31/5.5.32. This issue is present in a release since 18 April 2013 (5.5.31) and a subsequent release on 3 June 2013 (5.5.32). What is clear is that this also affects 5.1, 5.6, and 5.7. This has been an issue for about two months.

So this issue is written off as a bug. Great. Its fixed because it was noticed. It’s noticed not because it was just reported in the bugs system, but because there was a huge amount of traffic around it. While Tomas might say, “Reporting a bug is always a good way to communicate with us,” I doubt this would have been fixed in record time any other way. Also, I don’t need to rehash all the issues with the public bugs system.

I’m not about to start conspiracy theories here because that isn’t my goal. Our frame of mind since last week’s RHEL Software Collections news has been focused on documentation as well. Sheeri Cabral, an Oracle ACE Director, has had a rather interesting conversation on Twitter about our documentation. man pages aside, we’re improving documentation tremendously, and have over 2,700 articles in the Knowledgebase.

One thing is for sure with Oracle as steward for MySQL: the public perception of Oracle isn’t at its best and generally no one assumed this to be an accident.

Now let’s focus on something celebratory and positive: MySQL (NDB) Cluster 7.3 is now a GA. I’m excited by the node.js connector and the auto-installer. Can’t wait to give it a try. Congratulations all round to the Cluster Team at Oracle.

Subject says its all, this is of course, very good news coming out of the Red Hat Summit. Looking forward to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. And of course, CentOS 7 and the other builds that follow. Thank you Red Hat!

MariaDB replaces MySQL in RHEL 7. Glad to see that. #rhsummit

— Major Hayden (@majorhayden) June 12, 2013

at #rhsummit , rhel7 will come without mysql as it will be replaced with mariaDB; which is mysql api compatible. it will include mongodb too

— John Fulton (@fultonj) June 12, 2013

Towards the end of last year, I was asked to investigate the Red Hat Software Collections by someone that popped by one of my talks. SkySQL has been working heavily with Red Hat, and with Fedora 19 shipping MariaDB as a default, it seems like MariaDB is getting even more distribution. The Red Hat Software Collections 1.0 Beta is now available for users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

From a database standpoint, users now get MariaDB 5.5. I encourage all to try it, as it is an in-situ upgrade. It is described as:

MariaDB version 5.5, which introduces an easy-to-adopt alternative for MySQL for Red Hat Enterprise Linux users. Binary compatibility allows MySQL users to drop-in MariaDB without converting data files.

Sweet. But for database users, it also includes MySQL 5.5 (better than 5.1.69), and PostgreSQL 9.2 (better than 8.4.13). After listening to Rasmus Lerdorf talk about PHP 5.4, I’m glad that I can now use it with RHEL6.

I wonder if there will be CentOS Software Collections as well?

Read an article in PCWorld about Software Collections (see a press release too). There’s some developer documentation from Red Hat, and some draft documentation from Fedora too.

Thanks SkySQL, Team MariaDB and Red Hat!

Today I downloaded Fedora 19 alpha to give it a spin. Some quick notes.

You can get MySQL by asking for the package community-mysql-server. This is 5.5.31. If you ask for stock “mysql” (i.e. yum install mysql-server), you automatically get MariaDB 5.5.30 (mariadb-server).

Fedora 19 runs systemd, so there is no longer /etc/init.d/mysql to start/stop/restart. So just do systemctl enable mysqld.service. Then perform: systemctl start mysqld.service. Replace start with: stop/status too. You can disable it too if you want.

MariaDB 10.0.2 compiles cleanly on Fedora 19 with gcc-4.8. Just perform: yum install bzr gzip tar gcc gcc-c++ make libtool bison ncurses-devel zlib-devel automake autoconf cmake. Get the source code (I just downloaded it). Do BUILD/compile-pentium64-max. Wait. Run make test. Enjoy. Refer to build environment setup, generic build instructions.

If running in a VM, set aside 15GB to ensure you always have sufficient space (I personally use 20GB as I like to test various upgrade scenarios too.