Colin Charles Agenda » MySQL

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.

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!

o’reilly mysql conference & expo 2010

Colin Charles — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:55:53 +0000

It is my pleasure to be your Program Chair, for the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010, to be held April 12-15 2010, in Santa Clara, California.

It is of course, not something I embark on alone. I have a program committee, comprising of some amazing folk: Brian Aker, Kaj Arno, Roland Bouman, Sheeri K. Cabral, Robin Schumacher, Baron Schwartz, and Jeff Wiss.

I can highly encourage you to submit a proposal. You have till January 27, 2010, which basically means, less than a month, so get cracking! I also can highly recommend you to register as an attendee.

I’ll talk more about the processes, et al, in a later blog post, but I want to ensure that in 2010, we are going to be completely open and transparent in our decision making process. And I want you, the MySQL community, to participate. Watch this space for more details.

And again, its a great honour, being your Program Chair for the conference in 2010. I expect it to be a blast.