Colin Charles Agenda

Coming from a great MariaDB contributor, Mark, is:

1. MariaDB 5.1.44 / 5.2.0 Beta Binaries for Solaris 10 SPARC, and Debian GNU/Linux SPARC. Mark does a fabulous job of building these binaries, and he does them really quickly. If you’re on the SPARC platform, give it a go. Send some feedback, also.
2. Mark has also spent some time developing virtual machines. All you need to get started is download VirtualBox. Mark provides an OpenSolaris 0906 + MariaDB 5.1.44 VM as well as an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS + MariaDB 5.1.42 VM.
3. It is expected by the end of this week, when Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is released, Mark will upgrade the image to include MariaDB 5.1.44.

Thanks Mark! This is some fabulous work. Go give his VM’s a try and send feedback. Would you like to see any other VM’s? Any other distributions?

The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 is over. I hope all of you had a good time. I have plenty of blog posts and thoughts lined up about this, but first, I’d like to point out something that has become a tradition, that was continued in 2010: the O’Reilly MySQL Conference Community Award Winners.

Tim O’Reilly was kind enough to hand out the awards this year. In case people were wondering, the awards were pewter wine goblets from Royal Selangor.

Selection of the award winners happened via voting from the alumni of winners, and was all done in a rather short period of time. Kudos to the entire team that voted. Now for the winners…

O’Reilly MySQL Community Member of the Year 2010

1. Mark Callaghan is known for his work in leading a MySQL engineering team first at Google, and now at Facebook. In addition, the panel appreciated his insightful and always tasteful blogging, ranging from insightful benchmark reports to open source community advocacy.
2. Kai ‘Oswald’ Seidler is a developer of XAMPP, a multi-platform LAMP stack, especially popular amongst Microsoft Windows users. Many users get their first contact with the AMP (Apache-MySQL-PHP) platform using XAMPP!
3. Daniel Nichter created the Hack MySQL Kit, hacks on Maatkit and heaps of other software. He’s also a fabulous MySQL DBA.

O’Reilly MySQL Application of the Year 2010
Twitter was unanimously voted to be the application of the year in 2010.

Panellist Marc Delisle described his use of Twitter recently:

“Seven weeks ago I was in Niamey, Niger during the coup d’état. While borders and the airport were closed and a tank was patrolling on my street, I took refuge at the Canadian embassy where Twitter users updated me on the situation, almost minute by minute.”

O’Reilly MySQL Corporate Sponsor of the year 2010

1. Rackspace received the award for hiring many of the core Drizzle developers, enabling them to work full-time on the MySQL fork. Rackspace also contributes to open source projects like MariaDB, Drizzle and more, providing hosting.
2. Percona has over the last years hired many valuable MySQL contributors, and have a lot of consultants and developers extending MySQL and tools around it. Percona’s team blog on MySQL performance is also highly regarded within the community.

Another picture from the excellent James Duncan Davidson:

‘Tis the day before the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010. You can still register onsite.

This one is long, and is divided into: Keynote Additions, Open Space, The Tweetup, and Videos/Live streaming of keynotes.

Keynote Additions
The earlier lineup was already excellent, and now we’ve filled it up more. In particular, let me draw attention to:

1. Tuesday, 10.00-10.20am: MySQL at Facebook – Mark Callaghan. Last year Mark gave you insight into his work at Google, this year he will tell you more about MySQL at Facebook.
2. Wednesday, 10.00-10.20am: Under New Management: Next Steps for the Community – Sheeri K. Cabral. Sheeri gave a community keynote last year, and it is repeated again this year, especially since we’ve had an interesting year.
3. Thursday, 9.15-10.00am: The Engines of Community – Jono Bacon. He wrote a great book, The Art of Community, and he’s the Ubuntu Community Manager.
4. Thursday, 10.00-10.20am: Best of Ignite MySQL. This one gets made up as we go along ;) Get a preview at the Ignite MySQL the day before.
5. Thursday, 3.50-4.35pm: RethinkDB: Why Start a New Database Company in 2010 by Slava Akhmechet and Michael Glukhovsky. I’m particularly excited by this – Slava and Michael are the founders of RethinkDB, and their target? MySQL on SSDs.

Open Space
Last year we had MySQL Camp. This year we have an Open Space. Feel free to schedule talks, promote it guerilla style, and run your own side sessions. It does not even need to be sessions – organise hackfests, tutorials, etc.

Twitter much? There exists a Tweetup!
If you’re on Twitter, follow the #mysqlconf hashtag (and the @mysqlconf account for latest news, discounts, contests, events, general happenings, etc.). Why not, at 9pm Tuesday night, meetup at the Lobby Bar, for the MySQL Conference & Expo Tweetup. There will be drink coupons and then a no-host bar open afterwards, so come one, come all.

If you’re on Foursquare, why not come there, check in and try and get a Swarm badge?

Videos/Livestreaming available
Want to know what Edward Screeven has to say about MySQL at Oracle? Can’t be at the conference? Pay close attention the live stream. This is something we’ll do for keynotes. You can also look at recorded videos at the blip.tv channel. Ignite sessions will also be recorded. Main conference sessions will not be officially recorded, so come on by to the conference to see them happen!

Gentoo
It started with Brian Evans’ github repository, some good instructions on the mailing list for Building MariaDB on Gentoo, to a request for packaging, and guess what? Its now officially in Gentoo! Thanks Brian, and Robin Johnson!

SPARC builds – Debian, Solaris
Mark has now got a MariaDB category on his blog and the interesting things for you to grab are: 5.1.42 binaries for Debian Linux/SPARC and 5.1.42 binaries for Solaris 10/SPARC. Soon, you will see 5.1.44 binaries. Thanks a lot Mark!

Dear MariaDB users,

MariaDB 5.1.44, 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.

This release is based on MySQL 5.1.44. In includes performance improvements with Maria temporary tables, removal of mutexes and the aim of removing compiler errors is being achieved quite well! For an overview of what’s new in MariaDB 5.1.44, please check out the release notes.

For information on installing MariaDB 5.1.44 on new servers or upgrading to MariaDB 5.1.44 from previous releases, please see the installation guide.

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

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!

MariaDB: Community Developed. Feature Enhanced. Backward Compatible.

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.

1. It all starts with Kellan Elliott-McCrea with his introductory post on Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr. Follow the entire series.
2. 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.
3. Richard Crowley talks about OpenDNS MySQL abuses. Nothing too out of the ordinary, but it shows MySQL getting the job done.
4. 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.”