Colin Charles Agenda

Come meet the MariaDB Server and MariaDB MaxScale developers in Berlin (April 12 2016), talk about new upcoming things in MariaDB Server 10.2, as well as the next MariaDB MaxScale releases. Let’s not forget the talks about the upcoming developments with the Connectors.

It will be a fun-filled, information-packed night. Food & drink will be provided.

For more information and the opportunity to RSVP check-out our meetup page. RSVP soon as we only have 99 spaces available.

I have a few speaking engagements coming up in April 2016, and I hope to see you at some of these events. I’m always available to talk shop (opensource, MariaDB Server, MySQL, etc.) so looking forward to saying hi.

• A short talk at the MariaDB Berlin Meetup on April 12 2016 – this should be fun if you’re in Berlin as you’ll see many people from the MariaDB Server and MariaDB MaxScale world talk about what they’re doing for the next releases.
• rootconf.in – April 14-15 2016, tutorial day on 16 – I’ve not been to India since about 2011, so I’m looking forward to this trip to Bangalore (and my first time to a HasGeek event). Getting the email from the conference chair was very nice, and I believe I’m giving a keynote and a tutorial.
• Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016 – April 18-21 2016 – this is obviously the event for the MySQL ecosystem, and I’m happy to state that I’m giving a tutorial and a talk at this event.
• Open Source Data Centre Conference – April 26-28 2016 – Its been a few years since I’ve been here, but I’m looking forward to presenting to the audience again.

There’s some prep work for some internal presentations and tutorials that I’ll be running in Berlin at the company meeting as well.

There are a few upcoming speaking gigs this March 2016:

• flossUK Spring Conference – 15-17 March 2016, London
• FOSSASIA – 18-20 March 2016, Singapore

Two talks in London and one keynote in Singapore, while I will also moderate the database track on the last day of the conference as well. I’ve never been to flossUK before, but the schedule looks very interesting and I’m looking forward to it. FOSSASIA is an event I’ve been going to regularly since it was held in varying places (Vietnam, Cambodia, before finally settling down in Singapore) so this is an always exciting time.

Would happily meet you to talk shop, feel free to drop me an email: colin[at]mariadb.com.

I think one of the big announcements that came out from the Amazon Web Services world in October 2015 was the fact that you could spin up instances of MariaDB Server on it. You would get MariaDB Server 10.0.17. As of this writing, you are still getting that (the MySQL shipping then was 5.6.23, and today you can create a 5.6.27 instance, but there were no .24/.25/.26 releases). I’m hoping that there’s active work going on to make MariaDB Server 10.1 available ASAP on the platform.

Just last week you would have noticed that Amazon has rolled out MySQL 5.7.10. The in-place upgrades are not available yet, so updating is via dump/reload or using read replicas. According to the forums, a lot of people have been wanting to use the JSON functionality.

Are you trying MySQL 5.7 on RDS? How about your usage of MariaDB Server 10.0 on RDS? I’d be interested in feedback either as a comment here, or via email.

SCALE14x was held at Pasadena, Los Angeles this year from January 21-24 2016. I think its important to note that the venue changed from the Hilton LAX — this is a much bigger space, as the event is much bigger, and you’ll also notice that the expo hall has grown tremendously.

I had a talk in the MySQL track, and that was just one of over 180 talks. There were over 3,600 people attending, and it showed by the number of people coming by the MariaDB Corporation booth. I spent sometime there with Rod Allen, Max Mether, and Kurt Pastore, and the qualified leads we received were pretty high. Of course it didn’t hurt that we were also giving away a Sphero BB-8 Droid.

The MySQL track room was generally always full. We learned some interesting tidbits like Percona Server 5.7 would be GA in February 2016 (true!), the strong crowd at the MariaDB booth and quite a bit more. People are definitely interested in MySQL 5.7’s JSON functionality.

The highlight of my talk, The MySQL Server Ecosystem in 2016 was that it brought along quite a good discussion on Twitter. Its clear people are very interested in this and there is much opportunity for writing about this!

The Mark Shuttleworth keynote

But there were other SCALE14x highlights, like the keynote by Mark Shuttleworth. It was generally a very moving keynote, and here are a few bits that I took as notes:

• Technology changes lives
• Society evolves because it becomes possible to live differently
• New software moves too fast for distributions (6 months is too long). Look at Github. Speed vs. integration/trust/maintenance (the work of a distro)
• snapcraft 2.0 (learn more about your first snap): reduce the amount of work to package software. Install software together transactionally.

An overview of a next-gen filesystem

Another talk I found interesting was the talk about bitrot, and filesystems like btrfs and ZFS. Best to read the presentation, and the article that was referenced.

Scaling GlusterFS at Facebook

A talk by Facebook is usually quite full, and I was interested in how they were using GlusterFS and if anyone has managed to successfully run a database over it yet (no). This was a talk given by Richard Wareing who’s been at Facebook for over 5 years:

• GB’s to many PBs, 100’s of millions of files. QPS (FOPs) is 10s of billions per day, namespace (volume), TBs to PBs and Bricks: 1000’s. Version 3.3.x is when they started and now they use 3.6.x (trail mainline closely)
• Use cases: archival, backing data store for large scale applications, anything that doesn’t fit into other DBs
• RAID6, controller is enterprise grade, storage is more consumer grade
• Primarily using XFS, and are starting to use btrfs (about 20% of the fleet run on it)
• closed source AntFarm, JD, and their IPv6 support (they removed IPv4 support). They have JSON Statistic dumps which they contributed upstream.
• a good mantra, pragmatism over correctness

Some expo hall chatter

There was plenty to followup post-SCALE14x with many having questions about MariaDB Server, or wanting to buy services around it from MariaDB Corporation. I learned for example that Rackspace maintains their own IUS repository of packages they think their customers will find important to use. The idea behind it is that its Inline with Upstream Stable. Naturally you will find MariaDB Server as well as packages for all the engines like CONNECT.

I also learned that Stacki uses MariaDB Server for provisioning, as was evidenced by their github issue.

Its incredibly rewarding to note that pretty much everyone knew what MariaDB Server was. Its been a long journey (six years!) but it sure feels sweet. Ilan and his team put on a great SCALE so I can’t wait to be back again next year.

Apparently I’ve always thought that donating to opensource software that you use would be a good idea – I found this about Firefox add-ons. I suggested that the MariaDB Foundation do this for downloads to the MariaDB Server, and it looks like most people seem to think that it is an OK thing to do.

I see it being done with Ubuntu, LibreOffice, and more recently: elementary OS. The reasoning seems sound, though there was some controversy before they changed the language of the post. Though I’m not sure that I’d force the $0 figure. 

For something like MariaDB Server, this is mostly going to probably hit Microsoft Windows users; Linux users have repositories configured or use it from their distribution of choice!