Colin Charles Agenda

I miss a proper database related newsletter for busy people. There’s so much happening in the space, from tech, to licensing, and even usage. Anyway, quick tab sweep.

Paul Vallée (of Pythian fame) has been working on Tehama for sometime, and now he gets to do it full time as a PE firm, bought control of Pythian’s services business. Pythian has more than 350 employees, and 250 customers, and raised capital before. More at Ottawa’s Pythian spins out software platform Tehama.

Database leaks data on most of Ecuador’s citizens, including 6.7 million children – ElasticSearch.

Percona has launched Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL 11. This means they have servers for MySQL, MongoDB, and now PostgreSQL. Looks very much like a packaged server with tools from 3rd parties (source).

Severalnines has launched Backup Ninja, an agent-based SaaS service to backup popular databases in the cloud. Backup.Ninja (cool URL) supports MySQL (and variants), MongoDB, PostgreSQL and TimeScale. No pricing available, but it is free for 30 days.

Comparing Database Types: How Database Types Evolved to Meet Different Needs

New In PostgreSQL 12: Generated Columns – anyone doing a comparison with MariaDB Server or MySQL?

Migration Complete — Amazon’s Consumer Business Just Turned off its Final Oracle Database – a huge deal as they migrated 75 petabytes of internal data to DynamoDB, Aurora, RDS and Redshift. Amazon, powered by AWS, and a big win for open source (a lot of these services are built-on open source).

MongoDB and Alibaba Cloud Launch New Partnership – I see this as a win for the SSPL relicense. It is far too costly to maintain a drop-in compatible fork, in a single company (Hi Amazon DocumentDB!). Maybe if the PostgreSQL layer gets open sourced, there is a chance, but otherwise, all good news for Alibaba and MongoDB.

MySQL 8.0.18 brings hash join, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and more interestingly, HashiCorp Vault support for MySQL Keyring. (Percona has an open source variant).

Today I uninstalled CrashPlan on my macOS laptop since on August 22 2017 they announced they were exiting the home user market. I think the party is close to being over as even Amazon CloudDrive is now limited to 1TB of storage.

I wanted to ensure I removed any traces of CrashPlan. I use the locate command a lot. Ever wondered how to run the equivalent of updatedb on macOS? Its locate.updatedb (comes with a man page too). Run sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb and that updates the locate database.

Pleased to say CrashPlan went away quite cleanly.

• Amazon Drive no longer offers unlimited storage, with a thread on Hacker News. This affected me, since I run Arq Backup to Amazon Cloud Drive. What you really want to do is to ensure you’re now setting a budget, so that Arq prunes older files. I’m now using less than 1TB of storage, which is ideal.
• Speaking of Arq, Arq 5.8.5 for Mac fixes a bad bug. This is not what you want to see from a backup tool, but I appreciate the honesty. This is also why my cloud backup strategy is not just Arq+Amazon Cloud Drive; it also includes CrashPlan and Backblaze.
• I like to look at my Amazon wish list from time to time and sort by price. This has sadly been discontinued, so you need a little bookmarklet now to assist.
• kindle.amazon.com is going away. Seems they want you to use Goodreads, and there is a new site for your highlights: https://read.amazon.com/kp/notebook.

My strategy for photos is to place them in my Dropbox folder, and sync them to one box in particular but they also live on the Dropbox cloud (it also used to be that they end up on Flickr as they sometimes still do; Google Photos does backup in regular resolution stuff from my iPhone). All this gets backed up via various backup services (Backblaze, CrashPlan).

Lately, I’ve been wondering if that makes sense since Dropbox applies compression to my JPGs. I missed the announcement of Dropbox using Lepton image compression, but did read with great interest that Flickr is using it too – A Year Without a Byte.

Lepton “provides lossless, bit-exact storage for any type of photo, whether it be for archival purposes, or for serving live.” It is open source.

I understand it saves Dropbox countless petabytes. I just don’t like the idea that my images are being re-compressed without me knowing about it. It may be that other services do this too. But one thing is for sure – the moment its in my Dropbox folder, they reduce in size, and my backups are also getting said reduction. Sure it’s lossless, bit-exact storage. But I’m thinking about archival forever!

P/S: I’m going to guess this is why Dropbox doesn’t support Live Photos in Camera Uploads yet. They haven’t figured out how to save space…

A while back, I realised that com.apple.bird was getting too large and it was easy to purge it. I had to do this again.

The app I use to see where my space is going is OmniDiskSweeper. Its free, and I highly recommend it.

I use Arq to handle backups (in addition to Backblaze, and CrashPlan), and today I noticed that ~/Library/Arq/ had a huge (32.7GB) Cache.noindex. Apparently it is safe to delete, so that’s what I have done.

I also notice a large /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg – 8.1GB – and apparently you can’t delete it. The penalty you pay for keeping offsite backups?

Anyway, I suddenly have a lot more free space. Its annoying that I’ll have to keep track of all this from time to time, as one has to occasionally perform some housekeeping of one’s Mac.

Check out how Linden Labs, creators of the popular game Second Life, upgraded their MySQL database. The MySQL they use? Straight out of Debian! Of course, now, they’re running with the Percona patchset, against MySQL 5.0.84. Definitely a good read.

Its good to see Lars post about contributing to the MySQL replication & backup codebase. It sounds like the replication & backup team have decided that mentoring is the way to go – you get a “coach developer” if the idea is accepted. I like this very much, and sincerely hope it spreads to the rest of the server; it will help decentralise development of MySQL, and the endgame is a larger community.

While I know Christmas is over, The 12 Days of Christmas (MySQL Edition), is actually quite a fun watch :)

Happy New Year all!