Posts Tagged ‘Planet MySQL’

A few great weeks for MariaDB

I think MariaDB has had a great few weeks recently and the timeline of these events are important.

  1. 27 November 2012 – WiredTree Adds MariaDB for Faster MySQL Database Performance (well worth reading their motivations to switch)
  2. 29 November 2012 – Monty Program & SkySQL release the MariaDB Client Library for C & Java
  3. 4 December 2012 – MariaDB Foundation is announced, see ZDNet coverage.
  4. mid-December 2012 – Wikimedia Foundation starts migrating Wikipedia to MariaDB, not for any other reason besides the fact that the Foundation was announced (more ZDNet coverage).

Now, there have been rumors that the client libraries are just rip-offs or relicensed. They are not. They’ve been in works for customers for several years now (yes, Monty Program does need to pay the bills), and there are many a feature difference. This will be addressed next week to ensure that people know what they’re getting.

There have also been rumors that the foundation was announced with regards to the connectors. Wrong again. Connectors were announced first, foundation came later (see timeline above). You don’t do these things in a span of one week, the talk for the foundation has been going on for months. I should know, as alongside Monty & Rasmus, I’ve been somewhat involved.

I agree that we need better communications (remember to like us on facebook, follow us on twitter @mariadb), and we’re working on it. Its also that time of year when people love to take vacations (I am one of them). All that said, watch http://blog.mariadb.org/ closely as that’s the official channel for all things MariaDB.

2012 has been a great year for MariaDB in general, as the project grows, we get more coverage (see news reports), unparalleled downloads thanks to our 5.5-series being released, and our expanding product lines. I can forsee 2013 being even more exciting. Thank you all for an amazing 2012.

Happy new year and here’s to a great 2013!

MariaDB 5.5 has deprecated PBXT

One of the things we (Team MariaDB) talked quite a bit about since we released was PBXT. It was a feature differentiation to MySQL as we shipped another storage engine. It was included in MariaDB 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3; however with our release of MariaDB 5.5, PBXT (docs in the Knowledgebase) has been deprecated and not built by default any longer.

The reason behind it is clear: PBXT is currently not under active development. We still include it in the source releases and if you would like to use it, you just have to build it. If and when development around it comes back to an active state with bugs being fixed and the engine being pushed forward, I’m sure we’ll start building it again. In the meantime, much thanks to Paul McCullagh for developing a great transactional engine.

The SkySQL Reference Architecture

I have a bunch of notes from the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011, and I figure its about time I started blogging it. These are notes from the panel on the SkySQL Reference Architecture, led by Kaj Arno and Ivan Zoratti. The notes are raw (read their FAQ for more), and I talk a little bit about the SkySQL Configurator at the end (a tool I immediately used, and submitted some bugs/improvements for – 7 at last count, which I hear got fixed in the 0.02 release, which got pushed last night!).

There were 7 panelists. The MySQL world needs:

  • technical support
  • monitoring & administration tools
  • simplified interfaces
  • development & user tools
  • consulting & training
Services & consulting generally are difficult to scale.
The most comprehensive architecture around MySQL, scalable, adaptable and cloud ready
Implementation:
  • select and test specific components
  • integrate components
  • provision the components in a simple interface
  • simplify monitoring & administration
  • technical services & support
  • validate solutions
  • improvements and new releases can be done
  • knowledge sharing related to the reference architecture
Technologies selected from Webyog, Sphinx, Drizzle, Monty Program, Calpont, Tokutek, ScaleDB, Schooner, Linbit, Zimory, Canonical.

SkySQL Provisioning tools:

  • SkySQL Manager – control and administer the SkySQL/MySQL environment
  • SkySQL Configurator – configure and update SkySQL reference architecture modules
  • SkySQL Tuner – analyse the configuration and prepare the packages

I did a test, and it seemed like I got binaries built in under 5 minutes. Custom configurations with a stock build. You get a 70MB binary. Hosted at http://www.enovance.com/. A lot of people never configure their my.cnf, so I think having a GUI on the web might be a good idea to help people have sensible defaults.

lovegood:skysql byte$ ls
total 143352
drwxr-xr-x    3 byte  staff       102 14 Apr 06:13 ./
drwx------@ 598 byte  staff     20332 14 Apr 06:13 ../
-rw-r--r--@   1 byte  staff  73395132 14 Apr 06:12 SkySQL-mariadb-poboffcfrm5bi054559q8iea74.tar.gz

lovegood:skysql byte$ tar -zxvpf SkySQL-mariadb-poboffcfrm5bi054559q8iea74.tar.gz
x etc/
x etc/my.cnf
x install
x packages/
x packages/xtrabackup-1.4-74.rhel5.x86_64.rpm
x packages/MySQL-client-5.5.10-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm
x packages/MySQL-server-5.5.10-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm

SkySQL is also going to have a customer advisory board, and they are starting it this week. (I don’t know any further details about this as of yet.)

The SkySQL Configurator can only get better. I expect it will do custom packages including things like Sphinx/SphinxSE, Drizzle, and other things in due time.

Using MariaDB in production?

MariaDB 5.1 was released in February 2010. MariaDB 5.2 was released in November 2010. In terms of download numbers of MariaDB binaries from mariadb.org, we’ve seen 4x growth, and this is always good news (yes, we had our best download month in November 2010).

I run MariaDB on about six production servers of mine. All the Monty Program infrastructure that uses a database runs MariaDB (varying from 5.1 and 5.2). Monty Program have customers that are using MariaDB in production, and for that, watch out for some case studies.

Now I’d like to know: are you running MariaDB in a production environment?

Does it power your blog? Does it power a huge number of your servers? Have you migrated from another database? I’d like to know. Please shoot colin[AT]montyprogram[dot]com an email so I get a better feeling of how much MariaDB is being used in production environments. Who knows, it might even make a good case study?

P/S: Don’t forget that you can utilise the Powered by MariaDB badges.

Some Planet MySQL changes over time

First up: I normally read Planet MySQL from an RSS reader. I am assuming you do too. But in the interest of all the new features that the website itself has, I thought I’d take some time to talk about them in brief (to respect your time). Needless to say, go forth and check out Planet MySQL if you’ve not been there in a while.

A change in URL

We used to go to http://planetmysql.org but now it redirects to http://planet.mysql.com/.

Its also worth noting that from a Google PageRank of 8, Planet MySQL has dropped to a PageRank of 6. One wonders why?

Voting

Planet MySQL voting internalSometimes, Planet MySQL has got totally unrelated posts. They might be press releases that no one likes, or a post like this, which talks about Planet MySQL. Planet MySQL is after all touted as “Your blogs, news and opinions”, so I guess this post is in line with that. So unless I’m blatantly selling sexually enhancing drugs, or talking about thing that are unrelated to MySQL, I don’t think one should be voting down such a post. Anyway, I digress.

You get 5 votes per 24-hour period. This is to probably prevent gaming the system. And there’s visual appeal too, to voting. Planet MySQL - voting

Anyway, you can see the top voted (last week), and top voted (last month), on the left hand column of planet now. So if you want something to be located prominently, start getting your friends to “digg” the site ;)

Searching

searching
A feature that is not talked about often enough… Everytime the planet crawls your site (:20 minutes off the hour, if I remember correctly), it slurps the entire page. Sure, it displays it as an excerpt (so we don’t take away Google juices from you), but we do keep a massive archive of all planet postings… So even if your blog goes away from the Internet, it will always live on in the archives.

Its worth noting its searchable! So maybe you read something that’s interesting two years ago, but have no idea what its about. You can search, even by tags. Wow! I think this could be a pretty useful feature, if using Google itself, has failed you…

Tags

In WordPress, there are options for “tags” and “categories”. Tags only came around relatively recently, it was always categories previously. Now, SimplePie reads those tags when it slurps the entire page, and it gets displayed. When logged in, you can even edit the tags. I tried this, but it didn’t seem to quite work yet, even when logged in. Maybe I just found a bug, let me report it…

Buzz

Have you seen MySQL Buzz? Its a dashboard, showing you where people talk about MySQL in its entirety – voted entries, forums, Google love, and those fabulous word frequency clouds!

Today, I noticed that on Planet, we’ve seen famous words like: data, database, time, server, innodb, chrome, table, performance. In the Forums, its quite different: string, long, table, null, insert, code. Ha!

Anything else?

Go forth and vote for this post, if you’ve read this far. Next time, I’ll talk about the Librarian after I’ve tried it out. A post like this would never make it there (since this is very community focused), but think of it like a knowledge base/bank and it can be rather powerful.


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