Colin Charles Agenda

A few things to note recently, amongst MariaDB in distributions. 

1. Ubuntu keeps MySQL 5.5 despite MariaDB’s success. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but remember the key takeaway here is MySQL 5.5 & the fact that MariaDB wasn’t even in Debian yet when the decision was made.
2. MariaDB is now inside of Debian/sid – check out the packages.
3. RHEL 7 comes with MariaDB 5.5 as a default; this is a good thing.

Now, from a distribution standpoint, we’re looking at starting to ship 10.0 as well. Distro maintainers don’t want one-way streets (i.e. an upgrade to MariaDB prevents you from going back to MySQL). This is something we have to deal with as more start looking at MySQL 5.6 & MariaDB 10 (think temporal literals as an example).

In recent time, MariaDB 10 has been getting many new storage engines. We’ve seen TokuDB, CONNECT, SEQUENCE, SPIDER, CassandraSE for various use cases. For a long time, MariaDB shipped OQGRAPH, but it was disabled in MariaDB 5.5. It will make a come back as OQGRAPH v3 has been worked on actively by Andrew McDonnell. Keep track of this via MDEV-5319.

Another engine being worked on by Kentoku Shiba & team is the mroonga engine, which allows you to do full text search. It is optimised for CJK languages, and is supposedly very fast. To track this, follow MDEV-5222.

What this means is that from the start of the MariaDB project, the only engine that we have disabled and don’t include since 5.5 and greater is PBXT. That’s a pretty good record of having many shipping storage engines that have largely come from the community.

Another month has come to an end. If you’re looking to be updated on MariaDB content on a regular basis, don’t forget to be on Twitter (@mariadb), Facebook (MariaDB.dbms), or Google Plus (+mariadb).

There was a question on Quora – Is Facebook considering ditching MySQL in favor of MariaDB like Google did? The best answer really comes from Harrison Fisk, so I’ll leave you to it to read. The older link made its way on social media about Wikipedia_$ mv MySQL MariaDB.

MariaDB 10.0 went into beta (with the 10.0.5 release). We made a 10.0.6 release shortly afterwards to fix some bugs. One cool thing to note — the blog post from Ian Gulliver at Google about how Google is making use of MariaDB today.

The MariaDB Audit plugin is now GA – yes, you have to register to download it, but it’s worth it. There is also a webminar on this come Dec 5 which can be worth attending.

There is a new book out by Daniel Bartholomew: Getting Started with MariaDB. I fully intend to read & review it soon (you can also get this from O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf).

Navicat has announced Navicat for MariaDB for all your GUI needs on Windows, Mac or Linux. There is a free trial, or it costs in various prices for their non-commercial, standard or enterprise edition.

The MariaDB Enterprise Beta program started. I myself signed up for the beta to give it a spin. From what I gather most people that signed up qualified to give it a go. It is likely to go GA in mid-December. It is opensource software. Look at the getting started guide for more.

And in case you didn’t already notice, the Knowledge Base has had a redesign. There currently exists 3,165 articles in English licensed under the CC-BY-SA and GNU GFDL.

Today before Ivan’s tutorial, he told me that in the 10.0.5 virtual machine images he created, he couldn’t find the Cassandra storage engine. I told him it had to be installed separately, and this is true – you have to install some engines separately!

When you do a yum install MariaDB-server MariaDB-client like the installation instructions tell you to do, you don’t get all storage engines (so running SHOW ENGINES might have you wondering what happened to a bunch of engines). This can easily be seen by doing a yum search MariaDB. On a CentOS 6.4 server with the MariaDB 10.0 repository configured, you should see the following:

MariaDB-cassandra-engine.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-client.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-common.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-compat.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-connect-engine.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-devel.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-server.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-shared.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-test.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server

So to get Cassandra or CONNECT engine support, don’t forget to install MariaDB-cassandra-engine and MariaDB-connect-engine.

Once you do that, don’t forget to actually load the engines – for example you do something like INSTALL SONAME 'ha_spider.so';.

In fact, why not check out what plugins exist in /usr/lib64/mysql/plugin? You can also see this from the MariaDB monitor: SHOW PLUGINS SONAME;. This shows active and non-installed plugins as well. Read the documentation for SHOW PLUGINS SONAME.

Saw this on @awsmarketplace the other day:

#opensource #MariaDB by @SkySQL on @AWSMarketplace http://t.co/o3KQ9xe9sr #mysql

— AWS Marketplace (@awsmarketplace) October 8, 2013

Now on the AWS Marketplace, you can get MariaDB 5.5.32 on Ubuntu 12.04, CentOS 6 and Debian Wheezy. These are eligible for the Amazon free tier as well.

Would love to see people use this and to provide feedback. Do we need to expand this to offer Cassandra integration so you can spin up a basic cluster and get it going? Would you love to see this integration with Galera Cluster?

Much thanks to SkySQL for making this possible.

There is a Debian MariaDB plan from the MySQL package team. There is good news as on September 30 2013, the upload to Debian unstable is complete with MariaDB 5.5 (5.5.32). It’s now only a matter of time before this becomes available in Debian. 

Its great to see the work of Otto Kekäläinen finally make it into Debian. I would say this has been in the works for seven months. Much thanks to James Page (Canonical) and Clint Byrum (HP, Debian Developer) for reviewing and uploading.

This joins the stable of packages that are already maintained by the Debian MySQL package team.