Colin Charles Agenda

Lately more people ask me for comparisons between Percona Server & MariaDB. There isn’t a definitive blow-by-blow feature comparison yet, but it’ll come soon.

All that said, its great to see new features from MariaDB make it into Percona Server. The features that I’ve managed to track: group commit for the binary log, threadpool and atomic write support for Fusion-io devices.

It started with the group commit for the binary log feature in Percona Server 5.5.18-23.0 (docs). 19 December 2011 is a long time ago, and before we made MariaDB 5.3 or 5.5 GA as well. 

The next feature that made it into Percona Server was the threadpool (different implementation compared to MySQL Enterprise). We had a threadpool since MariaDB 5.1 (libevent based), but improved it drastically in MariaDB 5.5. It made its debut in Percona Server 5.5.29-30.0 (26 February 2013 – so about 10 months after we included the feature), but was further improved in 5.5.30-30.2 to include priority connection scheduling.

The latest feature to be included? Fusion-io DirectFS atomic write support. It made its debut in Percona Server 5.5.31-30.3 (24 May 2013 – so about a month since we included the feature). I like this because Laurynas Biveinis provided some feedback on the maria-developers list.

Great opensource at work here. I look forward to more features making their way back & forth between the branches.

I’m planning my calendar and thought I’d share what talks I’d be giving in Santa Clara in a couple of weeks for the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 and the MySQL & Cloud Database Solutions Day 2013. Its going to be a busy April 22-26 2013.

1. MariaDB Cassandra Interoperability with Sergei Petrunia on 23 April 1:20pm – 2:10pm @ Ballroom D
2. MariaDB BoF on 23 April 6:00pm – 7:00pm @ Ballroom F
3. MariaDB 10.0 & What’s New With The Project with Monty Widenius on 24 April 11:10am – 12:00pm @ Ballroom C
4. MHA: Getting started & moving past the quirks on 25 April 1:50pm – 2:40pm @ Ballroom B
5. Why MariaDB, and what is new? panel with Rasmus Johansson, Sergei Gobubchik, Ivan Zoratti at 9.30am on 26 April
6. MariaDB Galera Cluster Overview with Henrik Ingo, Max Mether at 11.15am on 26 April
7. MySQL and Cassandra Integration with Sergei Petrunia at 1pm on 26 April

Come along, use code SponsorSQL to get a 15% discount to Percona Live. The SkySQL Cloud day on the 26th is completely FREE so register now!

I for one can say that I’m truly excited that MariaDB will be part of Percona Live Santa Clara. The MariaDB session list includes:

• A tutorial: Improving MySQL/MariaDB query performance through optimizer tuning by Timour Katchaounov and Sergey Petrunia. You can benefit from this even as a stock MySQL user naturally.
• MySQL Plugins – why should I bother? by Sergei Golubchik is again something that isn’t only MariaDB specific since MySQL also has a plugin architecture. I don’t know if Sergei will talk about authentication plugins as well, but I can imagine this is on the mind of many people.
• MariaDB: The 2012 edition by Colin Charles – well, this is me. You might wonder what we’ve been doing since mid-2009 having only made our first release in early-2010. We’ve achieved quite a lot in the project, so come find out why you might consider MariaDB to your alternative to MySQL. We may even have a surprise in the way of some new announcements here.
• MySQL Optimizer Standoff MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.3 by Peter Zaitsev is focused on the optimizer features between MySQL and MariaDB. MariaDB 5.3 as you might know features a lot of optimizer improvements.

The BoFs schedule has just been released, and on Wednesday evening from 9pm onwards, you can come visit Ballroom A to discuss MariaDB, help with the future roadmap as well as be filled with lots of salmiakkikossu.

We have already confirmed our acceptance of having a DotOrg booth and can’t wait till that information makes it up on the Internet.

All in all, I’m happy to be attending and speaking in Santa Clara yet again in the April timeframe. This has become somewhat of a yearly ritual. Make sure you register, and don’t forget to do a little searching to find some promo codes!

Last week was a bumper week in London for MySQL users, DBAs & developers. We had the Oracle MySQL Developer Day and Percona Live London 2011. Both events were sold out, bringing in a good 300+ people to each event. From what I could tell the crowds were quite unique, so thats a good 600+ people interested in MySQL in London. The death and unpopularity of MySQL is greatly exaggerated.

At Oracle’s event, we naturally only had Oracle presenters. There was Simon Deighton (Sales Manager), Tony Holmes (Sales Consultant), Luca Olivari (Sales Consulting EMEA from the MySQL days), Andrew Morgan & Mat Keep for MySQL Cluster & High Availability. The event was actually pretty good if you were a MySQL beginner to intermediate user (that seemed to be the target audience — about 1 person was playing with 5.6, and about 1% of the audience was already using 5.5). The Q&A sessions were of high calibre, and answers obviously only pointed towards Oracle products.

At Percona’s event, we had wide and varied speakers, but an absence of Oracle. The crowd were already users of MySQL who wanted to get a lot more out of the database servers. It also served five tracks, so attendees had a lot of choice and value to choose from. There was an absence of beginner-centric talks, so one could get lost quite easily if you were sent there just for training. I already said I had an awesome time there.

The way I see it is Percona Live was meant for practitioners, while the Oracle MySQL Developer Day was meant for beginners to intermediate users of MySQL (they were probably already experienced Oracle DBAs). These kind of events are both important as you get a spread spectrum of people attending conferences. You can never really please all attendees at a large event, and in many ways it is always a balance you strike at large events like the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo.

All in, London was abuzz with MySQL. Both events were out in the Tower Hill area. It is clear that MySQL and its diaspora are alive and kicking, and its quite possible the community of users are also growing.

I was at Percona Live London 2011 these past two days. Very interesting conference. Good work Peter & team — you’ve managed to gather a good 300+ people at one venue in London. So full was the venue, that during today morning’s keynote I had to sit in the spillover room and miss out on Peter calling out my name :-) (no, Stewart and I were not drinking at 9am!)

Gave my session titled Why MariaDB? (slides). Pleasantly realized that there were many new faces. Better still, everyone has heard of MariaDB in the room. More interestingly is that a bunch of people are now also using MariaDB in production!

Had to rush through the last few slides (about how open we are, the worklog, knowledgebase, etc.), but you don’t have much time in 30 minutes so you have to be succinct! The slides are attached.

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!