MySQL

If you wonder why there hasn't been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I've officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of... But it feels good to be back!

During my absence, Giuseppe and Felix kicked off the Call for Papers for this year's European OpenSQL Camp, which will again take place in parallel to FrOSCon in St. Augustin (Germany) on August 21st/22nd. We've received a number of great submissions, now we would like to ask our community about your favourites!

Basically it's "one vote per person per session" and you can cast your votes in two ways, either by twittering @opensqlcamp or via the opensqlcamp mailing list. The procedure is outlined in more detail on this wiki page.

As we need to finalize the schedule and inform the speakers, the voting period will close this coming Sunday, 18th of July. So don't hesitate, cast your votes now! Based on your feedback we will compile the session schedule for this year's camp. Thanks for your help!

Hello from Santa Clara, California! I've arrived here yesterday and am staying with Giuseppe and Jan in the same hotel. Currently, the weather isn't that nice and we're all busy making preparations for the upcoming MySQL conference next week.

I'm fiddling with my slide deck for my talk about "A look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest", realizing that there is such a wealth of great tools that it's unlikely to cover them all in a 45-minute session. But I hope it will give the audience some inspiration about what tools to take a closer look at!

On a related note, I've just reconfigured Planet MySQL to display 30 instead of 20 entries on the front page – I assume next week there will be slightly more postings than usual...

As I already wrote, I will be speaking at the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara in two weeks and I am excited to be there again. This year's conference is going to be interesting for a number of reasons, but most importantly I think that the schedule looks great! This is going to be a "drinking from the firehose of MySQL knowledge" event. Afterwards, I'll be on parental leave in May and June, so I likely will miss a lot of great conferences – these months are usually quite packed, as our Open Source Events Calendar can confirm. I just received a notice that my talk submission to OSCON has been rejected, which currently leaves me with two more speaking engagements in the upcoming weeks:

On April 24th, I'll be at the Grazer Linuxtage in Graz, Austria. The schedule has not been published yet, but I've been asked to give a keynote on the subject of working in a virtual company and a more technical session about MySQL HA solutions. Linuxtage is said to be the second largest Opensource event in Austria – they had 28 different sessions and around 450 visitors last year. I haven't been to an event in Austria for a while, so I look forward to being there!

Even though I'm technically on leave at that time, I will attend the amoocon in Rostock, Germany in June (4-6). While last year's focus at this event was on opensource telephony (Asterisk, VoIP et al), they decided to broaden the scope for this year's event: "It is a boutique conference where we create an environment to give every attendee a fair chance to actually speak to each speaker. So you can tank knowledge and new ideas without the bullshit-bingo." I really enjoyed my stay there last year and look forward to talking about "A look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest" (for those who won't make it to my talk about this at the MySQL conference) and "Why you should be using a DVCS". I noticed that Monty Widenius will be there as well, speaking about "MariaDB release 5.1 - What is it and what to expect from it." and "MySQL & MariaDB history". The organizers are also looking for a speaker from the PostgreSQL camp, so this is going to be an interesting event for me. In addition to that, Rostock is a pretty nice city and the baltic sea is nearby. The organizers have limited the number of attendees to 100 people and the ticket price is slowly increasing every second day – so make your reservations now!

Berkeley DB (BDB) is undoubtedly the workhorse among the opensource embedded database engines. It started as a university project in the mid-eighties and was further developed by Sleepycat Software, until it got acquired by Oracle in February 2006.

I had the impression that BDB had lost a lot of its popularity among opensource developers to SQLite in recent times, which has evolved into becoming the default choice for developers looking for an embedded data store. I'd assume primarily because the code is not released under any particular license, but put in the public domain (which makes it very attractive for embedding it into one's code), and also because it's lightweight, supports SQL and has interfaces to a number of languages.

Of course, SQLite has its limitations and use cases (as every product), so it may not be suited for some particular application. As the SQLite developers put it: "SQLite is not designed to replace Oracle. It is designed to replace fopen().".

Yesterday, Oracle announced a new version of BDB. One of the notable features of this release is the introduction of a new SQL API, based on SQLite. According to Gregory Burd, Product Manager for Berkeley DB at Oracle, they did so by including a version of SQLite which uses Berkeley DB for storage (replacing btree.c). I think this is a very smart move – instead of introducing a new API, developers can now easily switch to a different storage backend in case they are experiencing issues with the default SQLite implementation. So now MySQL isn't the only database with different storage backends anymore

I am curious to learn more about how the BDB implementation compares against the original (both feature- and performance-wise).

Oh, and this is actually not the first time someone put an SQL interface in front of Berkeley DB – BDB was the first transaction-safe storage engine that provided page-level locking for MySQL in version 3.23.15 (released in May 2000). The InnoDB storage engine was added some time afterwards (MySQL 3.23.34a, released in March 2001).

I've been working in a fully distributed work environment for almost 8 years now (I joined MySQL AB in April, 2002). Therefore I've been reading Toni Schneider's blog post about the "5 reasons why your company should be distributed" with great interest – he raised several points that I fully agree with and which I covered in my talks about "Working for a virtual company - how we do it at MySQL" at last year's next09 conference (slides, video) and at FrOSCon 2009 (video).

However, Toni draws a profusely positive picture here, or, as my dear colleague Dean pointed out "The blog overly simplifies the realities of a distributed workforce, making it sound like it's all ponies and rainbows".

I'm happy to announce that my talk "Making MySQL administration a breeze - a look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest" has been accepted for this year's edition of the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, which will take place on April 12-15, 2010. The session is currently scheduled for Wednesday 14th, 10:50 in Ballroom E.

My plan is to provide an overview over the most popular utilities and applications that a MySQL DBA should be aware of to make his life easier. The focus will be on Linux/Unix applications available under opensource licenses that ease tasks related to user administration, setting up and administering replication setups, performing backups and security audits.

Of course I will cover the usual suspects (e.g. Maatkit), some of these are actually collections of different utilities by themselves. As it's impossible to go over each individual component in the given time frame, I will try to pick out the most popular/useful parts related to the scopes mentioned above. But I will also cover some lesser known gems that migh be worth taking a look at. What's your the most valued tool in your toolchest? I am still looking for more inspiration.

I look forward to being at the conference again and meeting with colleagues and friends in the MySQL community. Judging from the current schedule, it will be a very interesting mix of talks.

If you're interested in attending, you should consider registering soon! The early registration ends on March 15th. Until then, I encourage you to make use of this "Friend of Speaker" discount code (25% off): mys10fsp

I recently received a question from Robin Schumacher at Calpont, the makers of the InfiniDB analytics database engine for MySQL: "How would you recommend we try and get bundled in with the various Linux distros?"

Since this question has come up several times before, I thought it might make sense to blog about my take on this.

First of all, please note that there is a difference between "being part of the core distribution" and "being available from a distributor's package repository". The latter one is relatively easy, the former can be hard, as you need to convince the distributor that your application is worth devoting engineering resources to maintain and support your application as part of their product. It's also a space issue – distributions need to make sure that the core packages still fit on the installation media (e.g. CD-ROMs or a DVD). Therefore they take a very close look at each package and if it's really needed to be part of the installation medium or if it's fine to provide it for download from a package repository instead.

Distributors prefer to keep their core product small and restricted to the "basic OS building blocks". While MySQL might still be considered to be a part of this, this probably does not apply to the various plugins and extensions that are available for it. Therefore the best approach is to invest some engineering time and start doing the packaging yourself, either by hiring an engineer capable of creating and maintaining the packages, or by finding someone in your community who has the required experiences and is willing to do it.

While it's of course possible to set up and maintain your own build and package hosting infrastructure for that, I recommend to make use of the existing services provided by the distributors.

The top tier distributors all provide means of offloading the maintenance of "non-core" packages to their community, offering various options for packages to be made available. For example, Novell/openSUSE provide the free "Build Service", which is capable of building packages for other distributions as well (e.g. Fedora, Mandriva, Debian/Ubuntu, etc.). In addition to automating the builds, the Build Service also takes care of the distribution via their download mirror network and ensures that your application can be found via their package search interface.

Red Hat/Fedora provide something similar, named "Koji" – but it's "Fedora only". Here's a HOWTO that outlines the process of becoming a Fedora package maintainer.

Ubuntu/Canonical have "Personal Package Archives (PPAs) – if your project is hosted on Launchpad already, that might be something to look into for providing Debian/Ubuntu packages. Alternatively you could join the Debian project and start building and maintaining your package there. They maintain a list of "Work-Needing and Prospective Packages", a description of the process on how to become a new maintainer is outlined here.

If you'd like to target Solaris/OpenSolaris as well, there is the OpenSolaris Source Juicer – a web service which allows OpenSolaris community developers to build packages (using RPM spec files) and publish them for review, so they will be included in an official package repository. The Software Porters Community Group coordinates, advocates, encourages and helps with the porting of Software from multiple Platforms to the OpenSolaris Platform.

CMake is a cross-platform, open-source build system, maintained by Kitware, Inc.

From the CMake.org home page:

CMake is a family of tools designed to build, test and package software. CMake is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files. CMake generates native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice.

It has been used for building the MySQL Server on Windows since MySQL 5.0 – the initial CMake build support was added in August 2006.

For building MySQL on all other platforms, the GNU autotools (autoconf, automake and libtool) are currently being used.

CMake is used in some other MySQL projects as well, e.g.

• MySQL Connector/C
• MySQL Connector/C++
• MySQL Proxy

On February 22nd, Vladislav Vaintroub pushed the changes required to implement WorkLog#5161 "CMake-based unified build system" into the "mysql-next-mr" branch (aka the "Celosia" mile stone).

From this version on, CMake can also be used to build MySQL on Linux and other Unix platforms. For the time being, the autoconf/automake files are still available as well, but will be phased out once the CMake build enviroment has reached the desired level of maturity. The change was announced on February 28th on our "internals" developer discussion list.

The purpose of WL#5161 is to simplify the MySQL build system. It is much easier and less error-prone to maintain a unified build system for all platforms than two separate ones.

CMake has been chosen because of several reasons; the worklog description lists a few pro-CMake arguments (slightly rephrased):

• CMake works on Windows. The GNU buildsystem does not really work and likely never will work natively on Windows (Using Cygwin is not really an option).
• Traditionally, new MySQL features that required changes in the build environment (e.g. the plugin system, unit tests, most recently googletest integration) were always implemented on Unix first, leaving Windows behind (sometimes for years). This would not happen with a unified build system.
• MySQL already uses CMake since 2006 on Windows, so we do not need to start from scratch, only port what we have to Unix.
• CMake runs on every OS and compiler we support.
• It is simple to obtain and install on a wide range of platforms. It is available in all major Linux package repositories (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE). It is also in the OpenSolaris repository, known as SUNWCmake. It's in FreeBSD ports and available for Mac OS X. It is also very simple to compile it from source, the single prerequisite is a working C++ compiler and make utility.
• CMake has support for features we need and might need, e.g. system checks or cross-compiling.
• CMake provides integrated support for packaging. It can handle both simple packages (tar.gz or zip archives) and more complex things like DEB and RPM without much extra coding.
• Good integration with the popular IDEs (Visual Studio, Xcode, Eclipse CDT, KDevelop). Developing in an IDE makes the development process more enjoyable, and potentially it lowers the barrier for external contributors. Of course, CMake can generate traditional Unix Makefiles, which appear to be are superior to the ones generated by GNU autotools (for example, they have progress indicators, colored output and working dependencies).
• The scripting language used by CMake is simpler than m4 used by autotools.
• CMake is a single small tool, not a bunch of different tools as in GNU system (autoconf, autoheader, automake, libtool)

I'd like to mention a few additional reasons:

• Out-of-source builds – CMake can separate the build directory from the source directory. This is convenient, as your working source tree is not cluttered with object files and other fragments of the build process.
• Build configuration using a GUI. The cmake-gui package (based on Nokia/TrollTech's Qt library) provides a convenient way of enabling and configuring the various available build options. This is much better than having to memorize all the required defines and configuration flags.
• Integrated support for creating a wide range of package formats.

The CMake Wiki lists a number of other "nice to have" features.

From a developer perspective, I hope that it will make it much easier to finally implement two things that many developers working with MySQL have been waiting for (now that the build code has been cleaned up):

• Compiling the embedded MySQL Server (libmysqld) as a shared library
• Better support for cross-compilation

Building MySQL with CMake is quite simple and straighforward – the process is outlined on the MySQL Forge Wiki. The document is still work in progress and we'd like to encourage you to take a look at it, try to follow the steps and update/improve the Wiki page, if needed! Your feedback on the build process is appreciated. Feel free to join our internals mailing list to discuss your impressions and observations or submit a bug report via the Bug Database. It's likely that the build still has a few rough edges that we'd like to fix quickly (e.g. BUG#51502 – a fix for this one is already commited to the mysql-next-mr-bugfixing source tree and will be merged into the mysql-next-mr trunk soon).

If you're new to CMake, you might want to take a look at the "Getting Started With CMake (An End-User's Perspective) For Cross-Platform Building" screencast or the "Running CMake" article.

Happy hacking!

Shortly after I posted my last summary of MySQL releases, our son Mats was born and I went on a 2.5-week vacation. Our developers did not rest in the meanwhile and I'd like to give you a quick update of what's new since then:

MySQL Connector/Net 6.3.0

• Visual Studio 2010 RC support
• Nested transaction scope support

MySQL Workbench 5.2.16 Beta 6

• Fixed 67 bugs
• Saving your profile/connection passwords in OSX keychain, gnome-keyring or in an encrypted password-vault-file.
• New rapid development features for generating complete SQL Select/DML statements or names for selected objects in Query Editor to either the query area or clipboard.
• The ability to set a preference for the placement  (left or right side) of the sidebar in the Query Editor (Currently on Windows only, coming to Mac and Linux soon).
• Further optimization and stabilization of the administrator components

MySQL Server 5.1.44

• This release now includes InnoDB Plugin version 1.0.6, wich is considered to be of Release Candidate (RC) quality.
• Lots of bug fixes - see the ChangeLog for details.

MySQL Server 5.5.2 Milestone 2

• Also includes the updated InnoDB Plugin 1.0.6 and several fixes - see the ChangeLog for details. For an overview of new features in the 5.5 code base, check out the "What's new in 5.5" page in the reference manual.

Please note that the MySQL downloads section has been split into two parts. As usual, you will find downloads of both GA and development versions of all MySQL products and releases on the MySQL DevZone. In addition to that, we've now added a pointer to the downloads of officially released (GA) versions to the main web site on http://www.mysql.com/downloads/.

Even though things have been a tad bit turbulent around here in the recent weeks, our engineers did not rest and churned out an impressive number of updates and new releases of the MySQL Server and related products.

Here's a quick summary of what we released this year so far (in chronological order):

• MySQL Server 5.1.42
• MySQL Server 5.5.1 Milestone 2 aka "Betony"
• MySQL Workbench 5.2.14 Beta 4
• MySQL Connector/J 5.1.11
• MySQL Proxy 0.8.0
• MySQL Workbench 5.2.15 Beta 5
• MySQL Server 5.0.90
• MySQL Server 5.1.43
• MySQL Cluster 6.3.31
• MySQL Cluster 7.0.11
• MySQL Cluster 7.1.1-beta

Last week, my colleagues Giuseppe, Kai and myself attended the SAPO Codebits event in Lisbon, Portugal. Codebits is an annual, invite-only hacking event, which went on for three days. The venue they chose this year was the "Cordoaria", a former rope factory located in the Belém district, close to the 25 de Abril Bridge (which is an impressive sight!). I have been told that the Cordoaria is the longest building in Portugal and I have no doubts about that! The building is so long that the crew used bicycles to get from one end to the other. I've taken a number of pictures from the event as well as from Lisbon itself, you can find them in this flickr set.

The organizers described this year's event as follows:

3 days. 24 hours a day. 600 attendees. Talks. Workshops. Lots of food and beverages. 24 hour programming/hacking competition. Quizz Show. Rock Band Contest. Lots of gaming consoles. More food. More beverages. More coding. Sleeping areas. More fun. An unforgettable experience.

I wholeheartedly agree, we had a great time! The conference started with sessions and presentations on a wide range of topics on the first two days. Afterwards, a 24-hour programming contest was held. I was invited to give two talks, one being my all-time favourite about "MySQL High Availability solutions" (slides, video), the other one was titled "Why you should be using a distributed version control system (DVCS) for your project" (video, slides). Both went quite well and the feedback I received was pretty positive. Giuseppe talked about "MySQL Schema Migration" (slides, video) and gave an "Introduction to Gearman" (video). Kai's talk was titled "Think before you develop" (video) and gave a nice roundup of tips and best practices for setting up and developing new web projects.

The Codebits session schedule was filled with amazing and interesting talks in four parallel tracks. Sometimes it was hard to choose – some other talks I attended and enjoyed:

• Robert Nyman: JavaScript - From Birth To Closure (slides, video)
• Glenn Jones: Re-using social media data (slides)
• Brian LeRoux: PhoneGap: Mobile App Developer Zero to Hero (video)
• Brian LeRoux: The State of JavaScript on Mobile Devices
• Walter Belgers: Becoming a lockpicker

Walter gave a lockpicking workshop after his presentation, which I attended as well. I was quite impressed (and a bit shocked) to find out how easy many locks can be opened this way! Later that evening there even was a live band named "Pornophonique" playing (one guy with a guitar, the other one using an Nintendo Game Boy for making music), but I missed that show as I was too busy opening more locks... Fortunately the concert and most of the sessions were recorded on video (in excellent quality) and are already available from the SAPO video pages. Kudos for this speedy service!

But this just matches my overall conclusion of this event: very well organized, great speakers and venue. Thanks to the organizers for having us, we really enjoyed our stay!

This blog post is a by-product of my preparation work for an upcoming talk titled "Why you should be using a distributed version control system (DVCS) for your project" at SAPO Codebits in Lisbon (December 3-5, 2009). Publishing these thoughts prior to the conference serves two purposes: getting some peer review on my findings and acting as a teaser for the actual talk. So please let me know — did I cover the relevant aspects or did I miss anything? What's your take on DVCS vs. the centralized approach? Why do you prefer one over the other? I'm looking forward to your comments!

Even though there are several distributed alternatives available for some years now (with Bazaar, git and Mercurial being the most prominent representatives here), many large and popular Open Source projects still use centralized systems like Subversion or even CVS to maintain their source code. While Subversion has eased some of the pains of CVS (e.g. better remote access, renaming/moving of files and directories, easy branching), the centralized approach by itself poses some disadvantages compared to distributed systems. So what are these? Let me give you a few examples of the limitations that a centralized system like Subversion has and how these affect the possible workflows and development practices.

So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!

Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my observations from talking with many people involved in OSS startups and projects.

This time of the year is usually a very busy one, as there are plenty of events and conferences to attend. Just take a look at our calendar of OSS events on the MySQL Forge to see what I mean! Here's a quick summary of the ones that I will attend and speak at until the end of this year:

On November 14-15, I'll attend the openSQL Camp in Portland (OR), USA. I missed the first one that took place in Charlottesville (VA) in 2008, but had a lot of fun organizing the European Edition earlier this year. The upcoming one will be more like an unconference again - the list of proposed sessions looks very interesting and the attendee list reads like a "who is who" list of the OSS database community.

On December 3-5, I'll be joining Giuseppe at SAPO Codebits in Lisbon, Portugal, which is going to be a very cool event: "3 days. 24 hours a day. 600 attendees. Talks. Workshops. Lots of food and beverages. 24 hour programming/hacking competition. Quizz Show. Rock Band Contest. Lots of gaming consoles. More food. More beverages. More coding. Sleeping areas. More fun. An unforgettable experience". I will be talking about my favorite topic of MySQL High Availability (I'm currently working on revising my slides based on several excellent discussions about MySQL HA that happened on Planet MySQL in the past weeks) and about the benefits (both social and technical) of using a distributed revision control system (DVCS) like bazaar, git or mercurial for your open source project.

Shortly after Codebits, I will attend SLAC 09, the "Secure Linux Administration Conference" in Berlin, Germany (December 10-11), where I will give two MySQL-related talks (in German) - my usual suspects, but in revised and extended form: MySQL High Availability solutions and MySQL Backup & Security best practices.

FOSDEM, the Free and Opensource Conference, will again take place in Brussels, Belgium on Saturday and Sunday (6th and 7th February, 2010). Now happening for the 10th time (congratulations!), it is one of the largest Open Source conferences in Europe, with a strong focus on developers. Sun/MySQL have been regular sponsors of and contributors to the event in the past and it is alway a great experience to be there. It's very rare to meet so many well-known and bright people from such a wide range of OSS projects.

They have now opened their Call for Participation - the organizers are seeking input on talks for the main conference tracks (deadline: 2009-11-22) , lightning talks (deadline 2009-12-28) and project stands (deadline: 2009-11-22).

As for the last conference, we plan to apply for a MySQL developer room (and maybe a project stand, anybody interested to join? Please contact me!). However, the web site currently states that they are "slightly reworking the concept of developer rooms", so it remains to be seen what this will turn into. In any case, we will set up our own call for papers, once the developer room allocations have been finalized (and we were lucky). I was initially thinking about running another OpenSQL Camp, but it's probably too short after the upcoming one in Portland...

If you have an interesting talk about a MySQL-related subject, consider submitting your proposal now! We will gladly review and comment on your proposal in advance, if you would like to get our input or need suggestions about topics! Thanks.