Colin Charles Agenda

MariaDB is in Debian/unstable now, and its great to see that we already have a Japanese po-debconf translation (in under a month!). The last time I was in Tokyo, Japan we seemed to have great interest in MariaDB, especially with the backing of MariaDB.com/SkySQL investment dollars and the MariaDB Foundation to keep things real.

For me, I’m happy to go back to Tokyo to talk to users about MariaDB. If you’re in the area on Tuesday, 18 February 2013, there is a gathering of MariaDB users in Tokyo. It’s a half day event (1.30pm-10pm), you get dinner and drinks, but the best part is that the co-founders of MySQL, David Axmark and Michael “Monty” Widenius will also be there to present. 

So what are you waiting for – go ahead and register, and see you on Tuesday, 18 February 2013. Looking forward to great discussions about MariaDB, MySQL, and more.

Pic is of Monty in Japan in 2007, during the MySQL User Conference Japan

As I always do, I make last minute purchases for Christmas. It’s not because of the lack of planning, more so that I’m getting busier despite the holiday season approaching.

From 10am – 10.06am I called Machines in Gardens. No one would pick up the phone. I called iStore by C-Zone in Publika. Quick answer (picked up the phone within 4 rings), stock was available, so I reserved a few units. Within a span of 1.5 hours, I had my Christmas presents ready.

You win business by picking up the phone. 

At Harrods yesterday, there were three concessions that we spent some time around – Chanel, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton. Sales people at Louis Vuitton always seemed busy and generally left one part of their concession empty. They weren’t busy per se, just not engaging. At Chanel, you could go grab a bag off the shelf yourself. At Gucci, they paid good attention to you, spent time with you and engaged heavily. Guess who won the sales then? 

Pick up your phone. Be attentive to your customers needs. Serve in the service industry. You will be rewarded by being successful in business.

“I’m told that there is a Chinese proverb that says: 

If you want one year of prosperity, then grow grain. 

If you want 10 years of prosperity, then grow trees. 

But if you want 100 years of prosperity, then you grow people.”

(Via Remarks by President Obama and President Hu of the People’s Republic of China in an Exchange of Toasts at State Dinner | The White House)

As is becoming tradition, this year we celebrated the New Year’s Eve in London, and on New Year’s day we moved from London to Zurich. We woke up on New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam, so there were a lot of British Airways plane rides (now offering gate-to-gate usage of your tablets, kindles, phones). This past year, we threw the usual Christmas open house and only left on the 26th — something that I think was very useful, as I got to see a lot of old friends whom I don’t normally manage to catch up with (noon-8pm this time around).

In terms of travel, 2013 brought on 27 trips (36 last year), visiting 17 countries (20 last year), and 35 cities (42 last year). I only spent 223 days on the road (262 last year), and did 305,399 miles (456,110 miles previously). I’m still on my 28th trip so the stats are a bit munged now.

2014 is something I’m looking forward to. There are lots of exciting things brewing. I plan to travel a little less, looking at having more of a home base. I’m writing this after an exciting day walking around Zurich. I haven’t written a retrospective of 2013, and I never seem to do (i.e. look back), but when I look forward, I just see good things happening overall. Think positive, and all that ;-)

I’m taking more photos again (I now carry a more pocketable camera, the Fujifilm X-E2, which I picked up before Christmas). OK, signing off, time to go back to real life. Happy New Year’s! May it be prosperous for you (heard on British Airways, its clear the influence from China is now stronger).

A few things to note recently, amongst MariaDB in distributions. 

1. Ubuntu keeps MySQL 5.5 despite MariaDB’s success. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but remember the key takeaway here is MySQL 5.5 & the fact that MariaDB wasn’t even in Debian yet when the decision was made.
2. MariaDB is now inside of Debian/sid – check out the packages.
3. RHEL 7 comes with MariaDB 5.5 as a default; this is a good thing.

Now, from a distribution standpoint, we’re looking at starting to ship 10.0 as well. Distro maintainers don’t want one-way streets (i.e. an upgrade to MariaDB prevents you from going back to MySQL). This is something we have to deal with as more start looking at MySQL 5.6 & MariaDB 10 (think temporal literals as an example).

In recent time, MariaDB 10 has been getting many new storage engines. We’ve seen TokuDB, CONNECT, SEQUENCE, SPIDER, CassandraSE for various use cases. For a long time, MariaDB shipped OQGRAPH, but it was disabled in MariaDB 5.5. It will make a come back as OQGRAPH v3 has been worked on actively by Andrew McDonnell. Keep track of this via MDEV-5319.

Another engine being worked on by Kentoku Shiba & team is the mroonga engine, which allows you to do full text search. It is optimised for CJK languages, and is supposedly very fast. To track this, follow MDEV-5222.

What this means is that from the start of the MariaDB project, the only engine that we have disabled and don’t include since 5.5 and greater is PBXT. That’s a pretty good record of having many shipping storage engines that have largely come from the community.