Colin Charles Agenda

I recently kitted all the TVs in our homes with a Google Chromecast. It streams content from YouTube very well, and if you want content from other services like Vimeo, etc. you use a web browser (Chrome) to do the task.

I see it as a great productivity gain. You make playlists or say you want to watch videos later on YouTube. You use your phone or tablet as a remote and just watch content on your terms. You can then go on and read on the tablet, or work on your laptop. If you use the Chrome browser plugin for desktops, you can’t work on the machine at the same time as Vimeo or another video source will take the full-screen (though this isn’t a huge use case for me).

Sara had a party recently and part of the attraction was that people picked their music videos and added them to the playlist. So there was not only music but music videos. Naturally, they were all adding to the queue using her iPad.

Suddenly I understand why Android has the option for Users. This is a missing feature on iOS. Tablets are personal devices with a lot of private information on them (think Evernote, 1Password, etc.). Sure you can setup individual passwords, but the option to have a “guest mode” makes a lot of sense. It is something Apple clearly needs to work on going forward.

That said, for $35, the Google Chromecast is a great little device. Well worth it, and provides hours more TV usage. I’m thinking of getting a TV in my office room again!

As Frederic posted, its time to submit talks for the MySQL & Friends Devroom at FOSDEM 2014. The next year, it will be on Saturday February 1 2014. I look forward to being in Brussels again, and I hope to see you there too.

Submit to the MySQL track here, and don’t forget to be there on Friday evening for the start of the beers. I’m told by Frederic & Kenny that we’re likely to have a much more interesting community dinner since things are getting larger year by year. See you at FOSDEM and remember, submit talks!

Since MariaDB aims to be a compatible/drop-in replacement to MySQL, its crucial that in 10.0 we support all the 5.6 options/system variables, else we have to clearly document them in the Knowledgebase article MariaDB versus MySQL – Compatibility.

To this extent, Sergey Vojtovich (svoj) has created MDEV-5277 as a tracker. There is also plenty of discussion on this topic at the maria-developers mailing list. I encourage current users of MySQL 5.6 to take a look at the list and comment either in Jira or on the mailing list to ensure that when we are ready for MariaDB 10.0, we cover what you’re using.

1. If you hire a PR firm, you tend to find that they “influence” journalists to write pieces. Fluff pieces even.
2. If you hire an analyst firm, they tend to be interested in you and start putting you on their subscribers radars. And in all their reports. And naturally press releases.
3. “Tech press” are more interested in covering M&A, money deals, etc. as opposed to real tech. This democratisation of media has caused the mainstream ones to follow suit too.

These are global observations not limited to a region. Gatekeepers still exist.

Today before Ivan’s tutorial, he told me that in the 10.0.5 virtual machine images he created, he couldn’t find the Cassandra storage engine. I told him it had to be installed separately, and this is true – you have to install some engines separately!

When you do a yum install MariaDB-server MariaDB-client like the installation instructions tell you to do, you don’t get all storage engines (so running SHOW ENGINES might have you wondering what happened to a bunch of engines). This can easily be seen by doing a yum search MariaDB. On a CentOS 6.4 server with the MariaDB 10.0 repository configured, you should see the following:

MariaDB-cassandra-engine.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-client.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-common.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-compat.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-connect-engine.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-devel.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-server.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-shared.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-test.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server

So to get Cassandra or CONNECT engine support, don’t forget to install MariaDB-cassandra-engine and MariaDB-connect-engine.

Once you do that, don’t forget to actually load the engines – for example you do something like INSTALL SONAME 'ha_spider.so';.

In fact, why not check out what plugins exist in /usr/lib64/mysql/plugin? You can also see this from the MariaDB monitor: SHOW PLUGINS SONAME;. This shows active and non-installed plugins as well. Read the documentation for SHOW PLUGINS SONAME.

Saw this on @awsmarketplace the other day:

#opensource #MariaDB by @SkySQL on @AWSMarketplace http://t.co/o3KQ9xe9sr #mysql

— AWS Marketplace (@awsmarketplace) October 8, 2013

Now on the AWS Marketplace, you can get MariaDB 5.5.32 on Ubuntu 12.04, CentOS 6 and Debian Wheezy. These are eligible for the Amazon free tier as well.

Would love to see people use this and to provide feedback. Do we need to expand this to offer Cassandra integration so you can spin up a basic cluster and get it going? Would you love to see this integration with Galera Cluster?

Much thanks to SkySQL for making this possible.