Colin Charles Agenda

Interesting developments in the MySQL world – it can now be used as a document store and you can query the database using JavaScript instead of SQL (via the MySQL Shell). There is also a new X Plugin (see: mysql-5.7.12/rapid/) (which now makes use of protocol buffers (see: mysql-5.7.12/extra/protobuf/)). I will agree, this is more than just a maintenance release.

Do get started playing with MySQL Shell. If you’re using the yum repository, remember to ensure you have enabled the mysql-tools-preview in /etc/yum.repos.d/mysql-community.repo. And don’t forget to load the X Plugin in the server! I can’t wait for the rest of the blog posts in the series, and today just took a cursory look at all of this — kudos Team MySQL @ Oracle.

However, I’m concerned that the GA is getting what you would think of as more than just a maintenance release. We saw 5.7.11 get at rest data encryption for InnoDB, and now 5.7.12 getting even more changes. This is going to for example, ship in the next Ubuntu LTS, Xenial Xerus. Today it has 5.7.11, but presumably after release it will be upgrade to 5.7.12. I am not a huge fan of surprises in LTS releases (predictability over 5 years is a nice thing; this probably explains why I still have a 5.0.95 server running), but I guess this small band-aid is what we need to ensure this doesn’t happen going forward?

As for the other question I’ve seen via email from several folk so far: will MariaDB Server support this? I don’t see why not in the future, so why not file a Jira?

I think one of the big announcements that came out from the Amazon Web Services world in October 2015 was the fact that you could spin up instances of MariaDB Server on it. You would get MariaDB Server 10.0.17. As of this writing, you are still getting that (the MySQL shipping then was 5.6.23, and today you can create a 5.6.27 instance, but there were no .24/.25/.26 releases). I’m hoping that there’s active work going on to make MariaDB Server 10.1 available ASAP on the platform.

Just last week you would have noticed that Amazon has rolled out MySQL 5.7.10. The in-place upgrades are not available yet, so updating is via dump/reload or using read replicas. According to the forums, a lot of people have been wanting to use the JSON functionality.

Are you trying MySQL 5.7 on RDS? How about your usage of MariaDB Server 10.0 on RDS? I’d be interested in feedback either as a comment here, or via email.

Recently there was a discussion on the webscalesql mailing list started by Chip Turner on a proposed change to the MAX_STATEMENT_TIME patch. This feature has been known as per query variable settings (WL#681) and even shipping in Percona Server 5.6 as per-query variable statement.

This feature has piqued my interest since 2009, when the MySQL project (then owned by Sun Microsystems) participated in Google Summer of Code 2009, and we got code from Joseph Lukas to do just that (see his tree on Launchpad – lp:~jlukas79/+junk/mysql-server).

So code has been floating around since 2009. It never made it into a shipping release of any MySQL-based distribution till 24 October 2013 when Percona Server 5.6.14-62.0 was released. Percona’s syntax implementation was as suggested in WL#681. This got me curious as to if a feature is already shipping in a distribution of MySQL, what is the WebScaleSQL answer to things – is there a look at other branches or is compatibility from a user/DBA perspective only with focus on upstream?

I got my answer from Steaphan Greene. Very sensible, and a great direction to see how the companies involved can influence upstream MySQL and quite obviously the downstream distributions. It is of course great to note that this syntax improvement will probably be in MySQL 5.7.5 DMR (it already is in 5.7.4 DMR).

For what it’s worth, this feature works well alongside server-side statement timeouts, which Percona Server 5.6 implements (as an alpha quality feature) via the Twitter patch of Davi Arnaut. The MySQL team at Oracle has of course been listening, and in MySQL 5.7.4 DMR (release notes) they too have implemented this feature (WL#6936). Kudos!

Update (6 May 2014): Morgan Tocker has opened up mysql#72540.

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?

Continuing on from yesterday, the biggest news that I’ve noted in the past 24 hours:

1. The commitment from Oracle’s MySQL team to release a new GA about once every 24 months, with a Developer Milestone Release (DMR), with “GA quality” every 4-6 months. Tomas Ulin announced MySQL 5.7 DMR1 (milestone 11) [download, release notes, manual]. He also announced MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR2 [download, article]. Needless to say, 5.7’s code isn’t pushed yet to lp:mysql-server/5.7. Of notable mention were the statistics around MySQL 5.6 of worklogs, bugs fixed, etc.
2. The MySQL Applier for Hadoop which uses the binlog API to stream to HDFS.
3. The media was all over the SkySQL-Monty Program merger, so today its just links: TechCrunch, ZDNet, ArsTechnica, Wall Street Journal (WSJ), PC World, The H, and in one of my favourite newspapers, The Financial Times (FT).

Did I miss any other important announcements/news bits?