Colin Charles Agenda

Subject says its all, this is of course, very good news coming out of the Red Hat Summit. Looking forward to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. And of course, CentOS 7 and the other builds that follow. Thank you Red Hat!

MariaDB replaces MySQL in RHEL 7. Glad to see that. #rhsummit

— Major Hayden (@majorhayden) June 12, 2013

at #rhsummit , rhel7 will come without mysql as it will be replaced with mariaDB; which is mysql api compatible. it will include mongodb too

— John Fulton (@fultonj) June 12, 2013

So MariaDB 10.0.3 Alpha is out. Download it and remember to provide feedback.

When you run SHOW ENGINES by default, you don’t get CassandraSE or the CONNECT engine. Make sure you do a yum install MariaDB-cassandra-engine and a yum install MariaDB-connect-engine. 

You will run into conflicts if you had an older MariaDB-CassandraSE engine (so yum remove MariaDB-CassandraSE).

Once you’ve got the packages installed, you can either install the plugin or just restart mysqld.

Happy testing!

Today I performed a brew update. I noticed that MariaDB now exists as stable (5.5.30) and devel (10.0.2). Brew formulas also exist for MySQL (5.6.10) and Percona Server (5.5.30-30.2) now. 10.0.3 is around the corner but I wanted to run 10.0.2 now. This is how I did it:

brew unlink mariadb
brew install --devel mariadb

It’s that simple!

Towards the end of last year, I was asked to investigate the Red Hat Software Collections by someone that popped by one of my talks. SkySQL has been working heavily with Red Hat, and with Fedora 19 shipping MariaDB as a default, it seems like MariaDB is getting even more distribution. The Red Hat Software Collections 1.0 Beta is now available for users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

From a database standpoint, users now get MariaDB 5.5. I encourage all to try it, as it is an in-situ upgrade. It is described as:

MariaDB version 5.5, which introduces an easy-to-adopt alternative for MySQL for Red Hat Enterprise Linux users. Binary compatibility allows MySQL users to drop-in MariaDB without converting data files.

Sweet. But for database users, it also includes MySQL 5.5 (better than 5.1.69), and PostgreSQL 9.2 (better than 8.4.13). After listening to Rasmus Lerdorf talk about PHP 5.4, I’m glad that I can now use it with RHEL6.

I wonder if there will be CentOS Software Collections as well?

Read an article in PCWorld about Software Collections (see a press release too). There’s some developer documentation from Red Hat, and some draft documentation from Fedora too.

Thanks SkySQL, Team MariaDB and Red Hat!

I have never been to a DrupalCon before so my first was DrupalCon Portland 2013 (with some 3,500+ attendees). My first DrupalCon happened to also be one that I spoke at, and I hope to return to Austin in 2014 (added bonus: I’ve never been to Texas before).

SkySQL had decided to get a booth at DrupalCon since I was speaking and I have to say that the booth was very successful. You may ask why and the simple reasons are:

1. Everyone at DrupalCon was a user of MySQL. Once they hit scale, they may need professional services or even just switch to MariaDB. This is a captive audience.
2. Everyone running Drupal at scale with many modules and nodes generally faced issues with database slowdowns. Hello remote DBA, consulting, or 24/7 support.
3. We never had a bit of spare time to relax at the booth because people came over in droves to find out how MariaDB could help them, how SkySQL might make sense for them, or just poke us with general Q&A about MySQL. This happened even thru lunch, which we consumed at the booth. Let me add that lunch was great: Mexican, BBQ, etc.
4. My talk was at an odd slot: competing with beer at 5pm. The room was full. There were many interesting questions. People were clearly interested in improving their database for Drupal. Lots of positive/immediate feedback on Twitter.
5. Affable characters manned the booth. SkySQL sent Rod Allen and Marc Sherwood, and I enjoyed managing the booth with them. Conversation was great. The day I had to give a talk, I spoke all day at the booth then gave my talk!

It was also great to catch up with Dave Stokes, MySQL Community Manager, as he had a booth too. I hope we sent him some traffic! He’s also the writer of the Keeping your Drupal from Drooping series, so read part 1 & part 2. I reckon that I’ll blog more about Drupal & MariaDB soon as well.

I met some old friends., some of whom are working for the Whitehouse now. I also met some new friends who are all very gung ho about MariaDB at scale for Drupal hosting.

Here’s to happy Drupal & MariaDB/MySQL users!

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.