Colin Charles Agenda

These were my notes from the “Where is MariaDB today?” session at the Lisbon MariaDB Developers Meeting that happened in March 2011. I just realised I hadn’t posted it; also note that it is really raw.

Where is MariaDB today?

5.3 – look at the KB article titled “MariaDB 5.3 TODO“. A lot of things are in the review state at the moment.

Sergei has all the phone home code for the server working; what is missing is a host to collect the data, and also have a website to display things (Holyfoot will work on this).

Mark Callaghan says there are at least two different implementations of group commit work now, and Percona might have a third. This is in relation to Kristian Nielsen’s work. World’s largest workload on group commit is probably at Facebook — Mark’s implementation is in the Facebook patch. Mark wants to make sure that Percona ends up using the MariaDB group commit, because having three versions would be silly. Monty believes that we need to have something that works for everyone, not just for Facebook. Its late in the game, and Percona needs to agree with either the Facebook or MariaDB version of group commit. Mark is also concerned that the group commit patch is very large and intrusive. Mark wants a public design review for group commit. Kristian agrees – we need to have a better way to do design reviews with the MariaDB community (i.e. people outside of Monty Program).

Mark is worried that there are too many optimiser changes in MariaDB which make it difficult to roll out (due to bugs). The ultimate goal is to ensure that Mark doesn’t have to maintain the Facebook patch, and its all in mainline MariaDB.

“We don’t encounter bugs in the optimiser. We see bad paths but we force it.” – Mark

The Google patch removed subqueries from the parser — they didn’t allow subqueries to be run. Subqueries aren’t largely used in large data centres. MariaDB is going to have very optimised subqueries now (in 5.3). Percona does not really hack on the optimiser and the pick up rate of Percona server is great (they just published 1,000 customers). Mark wants to ensure we can show the deployments are coming.

Mark is also concerned we only focus on the optimiser too much. The optimiser optimisations will be complete soon. He wants us to focus on InnoDB and replication. Igor said we won’t be able to do it because we don’t have specialists. Timour says we should finish the optimiser stuff that has taken several years, and the future is that we should definitely focus on InnoDB and replication.

Percona (Peter) wants to ensure that when an optimiser change is made, there is always a flag. And there is in MariaDB.

Mark will sponsor a design review for Percona on group commit. He wants one solution that both Percona & Monty Program agree on for MariaDB. Kristian is open to this as well. Monty hasn’t reviewed the patch yet, its on his TODO.

Krisitan brings up two different mindsets:

1. The MariaDB way – you do something amazing, good engineering and then deal with the merges later
2. The MySQL from Oracle is upstream, you make technical compromises, and you make a less intrusive patch

Kristian focused on the MariaDB way for the group commit patch.

Sergei Golubchik takes the stage to talk about the status of MariaDB based on MySQL 5.5

He’s doing a bzr merge then goes through all the conflicts. Then one does the tests to make sure things pass. Then do a complete diff, and understand the changes and see if things need to get fixed. Monty admits the merges are getting more complex.

At the end of the meeting, the plans for MariaDB 5.6 were formulated. There’s a lot of work coming up ahead.

I’m trying to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 11″ without an operating system in Malaysia. I’ve seen prices widely quoted at RM1,899. With Microsoft’s operating system, it costs RM2,099.

Lenovo Malaysia does not have an online store like Dell or Apple. I’ve had no problems purchasing Dell and Apple based machines before. Even with a credit card, none of Apple’s or Dell’s resellers attempt to charge me 2% extra so that I bear the cost of credit card processing fees.

Cue to Lenovo. I call up their help line today. They direct me to Ingram Micro who very helpfully tell me they do not deal with end users.

So I visit Low Yat. They seem to have an authorised reseller there. Here’s where it gets interesting. If I buy the Windows version at RM200 more, I get free gifts (USB hub, thumbdrive, and some other random stuff) plus they’ll waive the 2% credit card fee (which they should not be charging to begin with). If I buy the OS-less version, they will not provide me with any gifts, and I would pay 2% on top of the cost of the laptop.

All this seems ridiculous since if I wanted to deal with Dell or Apple I’d never have this problem. And they’ll never tell me to pony up an extra 2% so that I bear the processing costs.

The problem lies in the fact that I like the Edge 11″. I think it will make a perfect portable Linux machine. It might only have an i3 processor, but its a portable 64-bit machine, quite unlike most netbooks one can buy today.

My only problem? I can’t buy it online. And if I have to walk into a store, I’ve got to bring cash or pony up a 2% fee.

I have not given up getting this laptop yet. If anyone has suggestions on how I can get this laptop from a retailer who knows that sending credit card processing fees to the consumer is not allowed, please leave a comment or shoot me an email.

P/S: Lenovo should train their support staff better. I called them with the intention to buy and they led me to a dead end that wouldn’t deal with end users.

As is tradition after the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo, there tends to be a storage engine summit right afterwards. This year it was expanded to also include plugins. I must graciously thank Facebook for hosting us at their campus, and giving us a rather healthy lunch, plus fueling us with all those drinks, caffeine and snacks that we needed to keep us going. While standing in the doorway, Mark (Callaghan) pointed to us that a certain other Mark (Zuckerberg) was walking into the campus, just like the rest of us.

The very raw notes are up on the Knowledgebase – Plugins & Storage Engines Summit for MySQL/MariaDB/Drizzle 2011. We definitely did not discuss anything Drizzle related, and we barely had time to focus on plugins, so the focus was still very much storage engines. There was representation from storage engine vendors: Tokutek (TokuDB), PrimeBase (PBXT/PBMS), ScaleDB, Sphinx (SphinxSE), Brazil Inc (groonga), WildGrowth (Spider), Infobright, Percona (XtraDB). Beyond the engines, there were people also representing Facebook, Wikipedia, Mail.ru, and Monty Program.

There’s a bunch of things TODO, and its probably worth commenting in the Knowledgebase if there are things that interest you. I guess next week there will be Worklog entries, mailing list posts, and connecting with folk to make sure the momentum continues on.

If you’ve been busy and haven’t registered yet, remember that early-bird pricing ends on 31/03/2011. From April 1-10, you’ll have to pay USD$100 more. A discount code for use (I think you save 20-25%): mys11fsd.

We’re full up in terms of the schedule. People are still asking for an opportunity to speak, and there are still opportunities in the Products & Services track. Please contact Yvonne Romaine at yromaine@oreilly.com for more information on this.

Might I also suggest that if you want to speak and there’s no longer an opportunity, you submit a five-minute talk for the Ignite MySQL event. Even though submissions are now closed, contact Brian Aker — he’ll try and help make some magic happen for you.

Don’t forget you can also lead a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session. While it is not a talk, you can still gather like-minded folk and talk about things over pizza & beer (which has always been a popular combination in previous years).

If you’re looking for a new job, don’t forget the Career Zone. There are some great companies participating, so that’s another good reason to come.

Conferences are all about networking. While not enabled by default, I suggest you manually go and turn on access to the Attendee Directory, so you can write messages to people you want to meet, have chats with, and so on.

2011 seems to be a good year for both Google I/O and Apple’s WWDC. Google I/O sold out in 59 minutes and Apple’s WWDC sold out in under 10 hours. They’re both held at the Moscone Center and I guess the caps for attendance is usually set at about 4,000-5,000 attendees.

My only beef with this is that the rest of the world is forgotten. It’s only good for the developer sitting in North America (or a similar timezone). In fact folk that need to get corporate approval are probably also forgotten. Launching at 9 or 10am PST is past midnight in China and Singapore for example. Its even later in Japan. What about developers sitting in Sydney & Melbourne?

Google takes an open approach to this. They will have live streaming available and are organising extended events (which again, think about the timezones — they work if you’re all together in San Francisco but you’d be hard pressed to find a venue that will let in twenty geeks at 2-6am). Apple will provide recorded video later to registered developers.

However developers in the rest of the world miss out on all the interactions, face-to-face sessions, hands-on labs, meeting other developers, and all the parties and late-nights in where partnerships get made, and new ideas get formed. The networking is why people go to these conferences, in addition to learning about the latest and greatest. I remember years back at WWDC that people will install the latest beta of OS X on their laptops at WWDC itself!

Sun Microsystems used to boast that JavaOne had over 15,000 attendees. Oracle OpenWorld claims over 41,000 attendees. Maybe its time to grow out of Moscone West and use the whole Moscone Center?

I urge Google and Apple to think about the rest of the world. Yes, we will take time out of our schedules to fly to San Francisco, put up at a hotel, all for the opportunity at being at one of these conferences. Not only for the content, but all the relationships we will make, with other attendees and of course, your engineers.

Use Twitter? Want to use HTTPS where possible, to prevent accessing it over plain HTTP, and getting “tweetjacked” by FireSheep users? Twitter now allows you to use HTTPS wherever possible. A good start. Its accessible in your account settings.

Use Facebook? Want to use HTTPS where possible? Account -> Account Settings and look at Account Security. Again, you can enable HTTPS. Very cool.

I don’t know how I missed this, but I encourage everyone to enable HTTPS, especially since I see the most common website at cafes, restaurants and other public places that are being accessed tend to be Facebook. I was at the KL Facebook Developer Garage (KLFB) at the end of February 2011, and I saw two speakers get fake updates on their Twitter & Facebook profiles, so I’m guessing this is not very well publicized.

Go, spend a minute, and enable HTTPS.