Colin Charles Agenda » Databases

Abusing MySQL (& thoughts on NoSQL)

Colin Charles — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:59:50 +0000

The NoSQL/relational database debate has been going on for quite some time. MariaDB, like MySQL is relational. And if you read these series of blog posts, you’ll realise that if you use MySQL correctly, you can achieve quite a lot.

It all starts with Kellan Elliott-McCrea with his introductory post on Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr. Follow the entire series.
He starts of the series with Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on the Cheap. Flickr scales using shards, and ticket servers give unique integers to serve as PKs.
Richard Crowley talks about OpenDNS MySQL abuses. Nothing too out of the ordinary, but it shows MySQL getting the job done.
Mikhail Panchenko talks about using The Federated engine for his series.

If you’re using the Federated engine, know that MySQL disables FEDERATED by default. In MariaDB 5.1.42, you get FederatedX, which is a maintained fork of FEDERATED, by the author himself! Bugs are fixed, and this is a supported engine, so if you’re using the FEDERATED engine, it might be wise to try out FederatedX.

I’d also like to bring to attention, an interesting essay by Dennis Forbes: Getting Real about NoSQL and the SQL-Isn’t-Scalable Lie. Monty says: “NoSQL is for very smart people who need a very sharp knife. People who are not capable of mastering SQL should not even attempt to try out NoSQL.”

MySQL Conference: Radar interview, “mini-tutorials”

Colin Charles — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:44:48 +0000

A few notes about the MySQL Conference & Expo 2010.

Check out the schedule. Its more packed than you can imagine. You’re going to want to be in many places at once, by the looks of it.
O’Reilly Radar has an interview with Ronald Bradford: MySQL migration and risk management. You’ll get a teaser as to Ronald’s thoughts, and a bit of information about his two talks at the conference on migrating from Oracle to MySQL. He has swanky titles for them: Ignition and Liftoff! Expect a lot of technical meat in both these talks…
The idea of “mini-tutorials”. Some talks take longer than 45 minutes to deliver, so why not have 90 minute sessions? Ronald’s is a good example of this, though it’s spread over 2 days. We have more:
- Don Beesing and John Powell talking on Where it’s at: GeoSpatial MySQL Part 1 and Part 2.
- Tobias Asplund and Konstantin Osipov will talk about everything stored procedures in their 2 part series.
- Peter Zaitsev will speak about InnoDB Architecture and Performance Optimization and the complementary Part 2.
- And if you’re interested in Gearman, there’s a spread over the three days, about it! Join Giuseppe Maxia and Eric Day to run you through: Getting Started with Gearman for MySQL, followed by Boosting Database Performance with Gearman and finally Gearman MySQL Hacks, or Everything You Wanted to Do with a Database Server and You Never Dared to Hope.

So, have you registered yet? Early bird registrations ends March 15 2010.

Iceland: An experience

Colin Charles — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:56:26 +0000

We planned for a company meeting to be in Iceland, with just about a month’s notice. You can do that, when you’re a fairly small company. Having been back from London during the winter, where it was snowing in the New Year, I was not exactly jumping high to visit Iceland. Ice? Gasp.

It was not exactly easy to get to Iceland: KUL – SIN – FRA – CPH – KEF. Five countries, in a little over a day (would have been about it, had it not been due to a delayed flight from Copenhagen — seemed that the plane was snowed in from Iceland). Upon getting my boarding pass for the last leg, I was asked by the SAS ticketing agent if I’d like a window seat – I naturally replied aisle, and he confirmed my choice with me, as if shocked. Then I realised, there might be some interesting sights from the plane, so I took his advice and got a window seat. Icelandair is nice! (in comparison to Lufthansa). Odd plane though – they run Windows (noticed from the mouse pointer), but the entire entertainment system is touchscreen based. Their magazine made a special mention that their playing cards were mentioned in Monocle’s Travel Top Fifty 2009/2010; they were for sale for 3 euros. I figured I’ll pick it up on the way back. Anyway, the view from the window seat? Completely amazing.

I arrived for the meeting on Friday, so missed a bit of the first day. It was pretty much in time for dinner, when I arrived at the Radisson SAS 1919 (important detail – there are 2 Radisson hotels here), so we headed to a restaurant called the Viking Village. Here we tried shark, had some nice lamb, and tried skyr, which they seemingly adulterated with something rather sweet along the way!

The next day, we had dinner at Orange. Before we stumbled upon it, we somehow found that on the 2nd floor, there was also the Malaysian Embassy. Very interesting :) Orange was beautiful, and Monty got us a tasting platter – something like a 5 course dinner, matched with appropriate wines, for each course! We ate like kings. It started with langoustines, then we had whale (which I think tastes a little like beef, maybe a little rare beef?). After that we had beef, and we got some pre-dessert strawberry foam, followed finally by our dessert (another variation of skyr). Being Friday, we all headed out for some drinks, so it was a night infused with lots of salmiakki, whiskey, and beer (this after the wines we had!).

Dinner on Sunday was at Hereford Steakhouse. For me, it started with a Cognac-infused langoustine soup, and for my main, I decided that I’d go for a steak and lobster tail. Skipped dessert, as I was pretty damn tired from the night before.

Monday was an excursion day. We tried our hand at horse riding. These Icelandic horses are apparently quite pony-sized, due to living in extreme conditions, thus eating less. We rode for about two hours, and it was the first time for me (and many of us). Let’s say I now have new respect for horse riders, and those folk at the races. You’d think it was cold; but the coldest part was stopping, giving the horses a break, and allowing the few to have a smoke break. I failed at getting my horse tied once we reached the stables – maybe I just had a stubborn horse (it was apparently a willing horse, not one for beginners). Consequently, I hurt a finger on my left hand, making it rather difficult to type!

The Blue Lagoon. Another photo, showing the steam.

For me, our visit to The Blue Lagoon was the highlight of the trip. I absolutely loved it. This alone, is worth visiting Iceland for. We were told that we’d be bored within an hour. Rubbish. We spent a good three to four hours there. They have a steam room, a sauna (which was a bit too cool for my liking), and of course, the geothermal spa. If more time permitted, I would have probably gone for a massage; apparently you can get one done while in the water. They clay-like mud, is quite relaxing when applied to skin. Your head is above water, but your body is submerged in the warm water. So when the cold winds do come, you still feel quite nice. Lifting your body up a little out of the water is also fun – kind of like “hot/cold treatments”. The experience is truly indescribable – you must experience it for yourself. Before going in, we decided to also grab lunch here – a day of lamb. Well presented, and very tasty, especially with the accompanying wine. Beware the bus journey: it took us over an hour to reach Reykjavik!

Monday’s dinner was at a restaurant close-by to the hotel. It was at Laekjarbrekka, situated a little on top of a hill. This place screamed romantic diners and fancy dining. They had good value for money sets, so I grabbed the langoustine set. It started off with a most amazing langoustine soup, flavoured with cream and Cognac, and we moved quite quickly to the main course (pictured), which consisted of langoustines, a langoustine tempura, and a baked/puff pastry item filled with langoustine. Paired with some rose wine, and a few shots of vodka before (I’m told that if you feel a cold coming, you should have some vodka – keeps the gremlins at bay), this was a most excellent meal. Dessert was home-made ice-cream, and again the presentation was fabulous. Truly a restaurant to take your romantic date to.

Anyway, the entire set of photos is on Flickr: Reykjavik, Iceland.

A few other notes:

You can buy shark meat at the airport.
Whale meat you need to visit Noatun.
The airport Skybus is cheaper when you buy a return ticket. But when the flight leaves at 7am, you’ll have to get a taxi to the bus terminal, and then board the bus to the airport from there.
Keflavik airport was voted #4 best European airport in 2008. Beware, their security insists you remove all electronic items from your hand carry. Cables included. This process can take some unnecessary time.
Credit cards are accepted everywhere – taxis, kebab shops, pizza parlours, the post office, etc. I have yet to see Icelandic krona, because I survived quite well without it. If your transaction is under-1000kr, you may not even be required to sign the docket.
The Keflavik airport does not have free WiFi. Power plugs are non-existent at the waiting lounges, but there’s plenty of power at the coffee places before you hit your departure gates.
Nightlife is pretty disappointing if its not a weekend. Even on March 1, to celebrate the end of “beer prohibition” (beer was only legal in 1989, afaik), the crowds were not all that great. In fact, not many bars were open, even!

All in all, it was great fun meeting everyone (a lot of old colleagues from MySQL now work at Monty Program), I think the meeting was rather productive (I’ll write about that in another post), and the time outside of the meeting was simply fabulous. Good choice for a meeting Monty!

MySQL Ecosystem – complementary talks at the conference?

Colin Charles — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:01:04 +0000

Its times like this, I want to hear from the greater community – the ones that are reading say, Planet MySQL or Planet MariaDB.

MySQL to me, and many others is an ecosystem. We’ve had for the longest time, complementary technology talks, like for memcached (which have been popular, filled rooms). NoSQL is becoming quite popular, and there are complementary technologies sitting around. To get an idea, if terms like the following turn you on: Hadoop, Redis, Pig, NDB (yes, MySQL Cluster is largely NoSQL before NoSQL became popular), Tokyo Tyrant, StormCloud (formerly Waffle Grid).

Now, do you want to see these kinds of talks at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2010?

Check out the schedule grid. Its pretty healthy already ;)

Also, how interested are you in talks about PostgreSQL and MySQL in similar environments? What about replicating between PostgreSQL and Drizzle?

So a simple yes/no, would help. I should get this into a poll, clearly… maybe next time.

Recently in MariaDB #1

Colin Charles — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:26:42 +0000

The aims of this kind of blog post is simple – I want to help keep the masses informed as to what’s happening with MariaDB, as a whole. There is a community growing, and MariaDB is a community project, not necessarily a Monty Program Ab baby (and we’re clear on this distinction: think of it like Canonical/Ubuntu). So, think of it as such that I’m sharing the good news, and summarising what’s been happening, to save you time.

MariaDB added to the Debian/Ubuntu wishlists
One of MariaDB’s goals is that it should be easily available for download. While we provide binaries and source at the MariaDB download page, we would love to see the binaries sitting in Linux distributions. So it is definitely good to see that it is on the Debian wishlist. It is also worth noting that Ubuntu has got it as a wishlist item as well.

MariaDB via the OpenSUSE build service
A community member, Michal Hrušecký, has decided that there will be tracking of MariaDB, and since it comes out of the OpenSUSE build service, you can find them in the unstable repository, for CentOS/RHEL 5, Fedora 11 and 12, Mandriva 2010, and OpenSUSE 11.1, 11.2, and the factory builds. All these are of course of the latest release available, which is MariaDB 5.1.42.

MariaDB for Solaris 10 and Debian on SPARC
Mark has very kindly decided to build binaries for Solaris 10 on Sparc as well as Debian GNU/Linux on Sparc. He even managed to write up a quick & dirty install guide, which should suffice for all intents and purposes. Note that these are still 5.1.41-RC releases, and you can expect to get updates soon for the released 5.1.42.

Using MariaDB with the MySQL Sandbox
The MySQL Sandbox is a great way to play with new releases of MySQL or MariaDB. Gerry Narvaja has got some tricks up his sleeve, to allow you to get going using MariaDB with the MySQL Sandbox.

MariaDB resources
A few resources if you’re new to the community:

maria-discuss mailing list (and its archives)
maria-developers mailing list (and its archives)
#maria IRC logs. Don’t hesitate to join us on irc.freenode.net on #maria

Community Shoutout
Without the active community hacking on MariaDB, we would not be where we are today. So I’d like to express a word of thanks to those that are featured here in this particular post. Thank you Michal for the work with the OpenSUSE build service, thank you Mark for the Sparc related builds, and thank you the archivist for keeping the logs of #maria going. Maybe next time, I’ll attempt to feature a contributor of the newsletter, or something ;)

Hope you’ve found this useful, and the aim is to have this bi-monthly, more frequent if there is a need for it. I might even record it as a short podcast, so you can take it on the go. If you have thoughts on this, don’t hesitate to contact me, or drop me an email at colin[AT]askmonty.org.

MySQL Conference Update: Grid is up, go promote and register!

Colin Charles — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 06:24:16 +0000

This is a quick update on the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010, happening April 12-15 2010 in Santa Clara.

We’ve put up a preliminary schedule, and you can expect this to be fast moving/changing, as we confirm more talks. A tradeoff of this, is that you can now also see the sessions by track, which helps give you an overview of where the content really is.
If you’re attending the conference, why not promote it? We have lots of badges and banners for attendees.
If you’re a speaker, you sure want to fill that room up, so why not help promote the conference using the speaker version of the badges and banners?

So if you were wondering what kind of talks we have, beyond just the quick taster we had earlier, this should help you decide quickly, and register before February 22 2010. Why? Because you save a cool USD$250, which you can then use to buy beer at the Hyatt ;-) (because that’s where more cool discussion happens late into the night!)

MariaDB 5.1.42 released!

Colin Charles — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:46:49 +0000

Dear MariaDB users,

MariaDB 5.1.42, a new branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes, and many community patches, has been released. We are very proud to have made our first final release, and we encourage you to test it out and use it on your systems.

For an overview of what’s new in MariaDB 5.1.42, please check out the release notes.

For information on installing MariaDB 5.1.42 on new servers or upgrading to MariaDB 5.1.42 from previous releases, please check out the installation guide.

MariaDB is available in source and binary form for a variety of platforms and is available from the download pages.

It is also our pleasure to announce that we have a partnership with Webyog to offer their tools for trial and at a discounted rate if purchased within 30 days. Find out more at: Download – SQLyog MySQL Fronted, MONyog MySQL Monitoring Tool or via the software partner downloads.

We welcome and appreciate your feedback, bug reports, bug fixes, patches, and participation on our mailing list. Find out more about working with the community.

Enjoy!

Last chances to submit your MySQL Conference talk!

Colin Charles — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:16:48 +0000

The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 will be closing the Call for Participation at the end of the 27th January 2010. You have less than 48-hours – so get submitting already.

Take a gander at some of the shortlisted presentations, look at all the amazing tutorials, and what’s keeping you waiting from registering?

MySQL with yaSSL vulnerability

Colin Charles — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:00:46 +0000

It’s worth noting that if you’re using MySQL 5.0/5.1, with SSL enabled, and you’re using yaSSL as opposed to OpenSSL, you’re vulnerable to CVE-2009-4484. Its a buffer overflow, that works over TCP, via the MySQL port, 3306. Lenz furnished us with some information, and the patch is available. You’ll see this rocking when MySQL 5.1.43 gets released.

It affects Debian (presumably, it will also affect Ubuntu). Red Hat/CentOS is spared, because instead of using yaSSL, OpenSSL is used.

MariaDB 5.1.41-rc (based on MySQL 5.1.41) which was just released a few days ago, naturally is also affected. The next release candidate might potentially be rebased against 5.1.42 (the builds are already ready, from what I understand), and will include this patch.

Some yaSSL trivia: did you know that one of the two co-founders of the project, is actually Larry Stefonic? Larry was an early MySQL Ab employee, holding quite a few positions at MySQL Ab; he was the President of MySQL KK (the Japanese branch), and was also SVP for worldwide OEM sales!

Some MySQL-related links

Colin Charles — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:10:57 +0000

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!