I’m under the assumption that no shocking news are delivered. That is, that for the near future, it’s business as usual for MySQL.

Last year’s great message, delivered by Karen Padir, was “more community”. More community participation, more community patches. Looking back, I’m not sure I saw that coming true. The 5.4 version was announced at that same conference, and was criticized for being community-oriented yet community-hidden. The latest 5.5 milestones announcement took everyone by surprise again. Ideas from Google patches were incorporated into 5.5M2. but, to the best of my understanding, no community patch was delievered.

I have both congratulated and expressed my desire that community took greater part in this.

So what am I looking forward to hear?

1. Like everyone else, the general plans Oracle holds for MySQL. Again, I’m not expecting shocking news here.
2. The expected roadmap for MySQL, technically speaking. I don’t actually know if there is a roadmap right now.
3. The intended role for the MySQL community. Frankly, it would be just fine with me if Oracle were to say: “we will not accept community patches”, and that would be the end of it. That’s fine, because it’s their right, and it would be an honest announcement. Naturally, I’ll be much happier to hear “we will incorporate the best 20 community patches withing the next three days”. Somewhere in between, I’ll be really satisfied with a clear explanation of how Oracle sees the community, and how it would like to cooperate with it. Will it share the development plan with the community? Will it allow the community to have a say about what goes in or not?

I realize this must all be very pressing, what with the acquisition; big new company; new rules; new bosses; new things to learn. But I do believe it’s in Oracle’s best interest (and obligation) to speak up their mind on MySQL in relation to the community.

The situation where the users (not the community) don’t know what’s planned for MySQL on the technical level, what’s the next milestone, when the 5.4/5.5 versions are scheduled to be released, what will happen with all those features which were supposed to be incorporated into 5.2/6.0 — had better be done with quickly.

My congratulations to the MySQL team on the finalization of the acquisition, and best wishes to a smooth and successful merge into Oracle.

But what I’ve just recalled was a discussion (was it previous year, or the one before that?) comparing the “PostgreSQL Conference” and the “MySQL Users Conference”, as it was named back then. In that discussion, the PostgreSQL people were bashing MySQL, saying that the “PostgreSQL Conference” was all about the database and whatever was around it, whilst the “MySQL Users Conference” clearly stated that the attendees were “just users”, not like real participants or members.

As I recall, it was a heat debate (and I apologize for not linking). I thought it was just semantics.

Anyway, here we are at 2009, there is no “Users”, it’s just like in PostgreSQL, and I still think it’s just semantics.

I think a name can mean whatever you want it to mean. It’s best to judge by actions, which is an altogether different thing.

I do not hold a position this way or the other.

This concludes my postings with regard to the MySQL (Users?) Conference & Expo 2009, which were non-technical. I’ll keep to technical stuff in the future, I promise. I enjoyed the conference very much, a big applaude to the presenters and the organizers, and to the many friendly people who attended!

What did I attend?

Maria In Depth, Monty Widenius, MontyProgram AB (Percona conference): Monty was discussing Maria performance-wise as opposed to his later session which was feature-wise). He did delve just a little bit into the decision making issues in MySQL and in his new company. He also spoke (and I believe this took the most weight of the session, even if not the most time) of his new company, what he wants to achieve and how.

Build Your Own MySQL Time Machine, (Sun Microsystems), Mats Kindahl (Sun Microsystems). A web based utility for creating online backups and performing a point in time restoration was presented. The system is based on MySQL 6.0′s new backup mechanism, and runs on a slave. The presenters showed how easy it would be to say “I would like to restore data to as it was yesterday 14:56pm”. Hope to see such final product in the future!

Fighting MySQL Replication Lag, Peter Zaitsev (Percona conference). Peter explained the causes for replication lag, the types of measurements which should be made, how to make them, and of course, hot to avoid replication lag. He discussed solutions starting from tuning queries in such way that the slave need not repeat complicated work done by the master; ways of warming up the slaves (for example, using Maatkit’s mk-slave-prefetch) and more. It was an interesting short session. I must say that the short session idea is a pretty good one. It keeps you awake and concentrated.

Monitoring 101: Simple Stuff to Save Your Bacon Ronald Bradford (42SQL): Ronald made a convincing argument for using proper and system wide monitoring mechanisms, by following some customer stories. He presented OS level (disk, memory, CPU, network) monitoring and diagnosing utilities; has lay down the basics for monitoring MySQL (SHOW STATUS, SHOW PROCESSLIST etc.), and finally discussed some common monitoring utilities. It was a good overview of the needs and capabilities of monitoring.

Innodb Database Recovery Techniques Peter Zaitsev: Peter presented some sophisticated techniques, some of which were developed by Percona, to recover from InnoDB corruption. He also explained the innodb recovery mechanism and the innodb_recovery_level parameter.

Quick wins with third party MySQL patches, Morgan Tocker, Percona (Percona conference): Morgan presented some of the Percona patches. Again, this was a short session, and to the point.

In between I entered and left some more talks, which did not catch my attention. A busy day, all in all!

The day started with the State of the Dolphin by Karen Padir (Sun Microsystems). She threw in some announcement, among which were MySQL 5.4, MySQL Cluster 7.0, better release cycles (matching the Enterprise), better code import from the community. Anyway, there is already a lot of talk about that.

Later on, This is Not a Web App: The Evolution of a MySQL Deployment at Google, Mark Callaghan (Google) was a very interesting session, in which Mark described the needs for an enterprise database Google and (mysterious) others had, and the steps taken to modify MySQL in this direction. Mark explained the build & test process they use at Google, teased the MySQL Query Analyzer guys (“it’s amazing what you can do with sed & awk, actually”) – though expressed his appreciation of their work, and mentioned various contributors and collaborators. It was an interesting session, very wide in scope, I think.

The rest of my schedule for the day was:

MySQL and Search at Craigslist Jeremy Zawodny: a fast pace presented session, which described the growth challenges Craigslist were/are facing, and the MySQL solutions used. Jeremy spoke about the sphinx storage engine, and has discussed its many advantages. He also described the sharding solutions used and the master-slaves configurations.

Starring Sakila: Data Warehousing Explained, Illustrated, and Subtitled Roland Bouman, Matt Casters. In this presentation Roland explained the basics of data warehousing: he discussed the related buzzwords and then demonstrated, using the sakilla database, and example star schema building process. Matt took on from there to present the Kettle tool (and other kitchen stuff), and the way DWH can be graphically designed, and data generated. I was personally more interested in the first part, I have very little experience with DWH, and Roland did a good job of make a simple and clear enough starting point.

Rethinking MySQL, Enter Drizzle Brian Aker. That one was especially crowded. This was a session which presented Drizzle, the motivation behind it, what it consisted of, the decision making process, the community collaboration, the tools used in the project and more. It was a comprehensive “what drizzle is all about and what can be achieved with it” talk, and no doubt Brian Aker is a talented speaker, I’m not sure anyone were typing on their laptops during this talk…

The PBXT Storage Engine: Meeting Future Challenges Paul McCullagh. Another interesting talk! The creator of PBXT gave an overview of the storage engine, and discussed some of the internals. He let us peek into the developing process by presenting some of the latest performance improvements he made, and through that, discusses multi cores issues, SSDs and more. This takes me back to Mark Callaghan’s session that morning, in which he praised the InnoDB performance, code, developers, but then added: “I thought I had the fastest storage engine, but then I tested PBXT…”

Solving Common SQL Problems with the SeqEngine Beat Vontobel: the SeqEngine is an idea for a storage engine which generates sequences. A simplified, incomplete – yet surprisingly potent -  implementation was presented. Beat has discussed various problems which could be solved with the SeqEngine. What was really nice about it is that it does not actually store data, but generates it on the fly, and yet, as far as MySQL is concerned, has a full blown indexing implementation. Finding table holes; generating sample data; normalizing (<= 2NF) data were among the problems for which the SeqEngine provided solutions. I enjoyed this session very much. On one hand, it was a modest one (this is a small scale development, unlike the huge PBXT, Drizzle discussed earlier), and yet elegant. The problems presented were the common daily time consuming problems any DBA encounters, and so it was practical and to the point.

In between all these, there was the Expo, ice creams, T-shirts and many good talks and interesting people – the last being the major reason to attend the conference. I mean, apart from the ice cream.

I do hope to get to have some more chit chat during Wednesday.

In retrospective, there have been some hints along the way. But I don’t get hints. I’m the kind of man who, when watching a complicated movie, needs his girlfriend to explain him what goes on.

I was utterly astonished and honored to find my name on the screen, and have me being one of three people called to accept the MySQL Community Award for 2009.

Let me tell you: it is heavy! And it doesn’t fit in my bag, either, so I hang around carrying this big heavy box in both hands…

I guess this calls for a short Oscar speech, a written one.

My friends and neighbors have heard me say the word “community” quite a lot lately. I was mentioning to them how wild it is. I’ve been working with open source for some 10 years, and have been using MySQL in particular for 9 years now. The open source model always impressed me with its elegance and honesty. Back when I only started using MySQL, I used to play with the thought I should sometime contribute back.

OK, so it took 8 years to get me moving. Hey, that’s quick for me! I have lamps I need to install in our living room, and it’s been almost a year since I bought them!

About a year and a half ago I started doing MySQL consulting. A few months later, when MySQL first started their trainings in Israel, I became an official MySQL instructor. I then started working on some open source projects I’ve been thinking about, getting more and more ideas through my consulting and training work.

At about 6 months ago, I started actively blogging about MySQL. I usually blog about technical issues, many of which come up from my daily experience. I express opinions, some of which may change over time; I sometimes write “mini tutorials” or so, etc.

A couple of months ago I released the openark kit, an open source set of utilities for MySQL. It’s still being developed, and interesting (I think) new stuff is coming up.

It’s funny, because so many things are being done from my home, in a small village up north. But then again, it’s a small world. That’s what’s so wild about the community. It is powerful, large, fast moving and fast responding. It’s as if everyone is gathered in one small room.

Thank you, MySQL, for this honor, and, of course, thank you, the MySQL and open source community!

OK, everyone, wipe your tears, the movie has ended. Today is a very interesting day at the conference, and cakes are now being served! [IMPORTANT UPDATE] Ice creams, not cakes!

Monday: day of tutorials. Plenty of interesting tutorials on the Conference itself, plus a session with Mark Callaghan – it was hard to choose. I settled for two tutorials, which turned out to be three.

Practical MySQL Plugin Development: As a C/C++/Java developer, I am very interested in the plugin API. I have used UDF before, and these turned out to be extremely helpful, and solved me a lot of headache. With the new plugin API I was expecting to learn how to properly write INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables, functions and engines.

Wasn’t it possible to learn all this on the web? Sure, but this presentation was delivered by Roland Bouman and Sergei Golubchik, and I was anxious to hear from their experience. Well, that’s what the conference is all about, isn’t it?

The session was very good. Roland & Sergei covered the basics of the Plugin API, the general ideas, then went on to present the specific implementations: daemon plugins, INFORMATION_SCHEMA, FULLTEXT. The session was accompanied by convincing and enlighting examples. For example, a QUERY_CACHE_TABLE: an INFORMATION_SCHEMA table which lists which queries are currently in the query cache, along with the number of used blocks etc.

However, I was a bit discouraged by several findings:

• The Plugin API is not well defined. It is not stabilized nor well documented. This means the API may change frequently, rendering your plugins useless.
• In order to develop a plugin, you must compile it against every single MySQL version you want the plugin to be deployed with. You actually need to recompile MySQL from source to do so. I find this discouraging, since it’s a lot of hassle: each time you change anything in your plugin, you get to have a dozen, maybe more, MySQL source compilations to work through. I believe this will generally make developers less eager to develop plugins (but maybe it’s just me!).

I next attended SQL Antipatterns Strike Back by Bill Karwin. I was impressed by his last year “SQL Antipatterns” presentation (I didn’t attend, just downloaded) and was keen to see what he had to add.

A lot of interesting issues were presented: trees, polymorphic tables, and more. Some were less of an interest (e.g. using a separate table instead of ENUM, using DECIMAL instead of FLOAT for currency calculations), and I found them to be very basic (of course, I don’t consider this as ‘bad’).

On a critic note, with pardon, the presenter seemed a bit out of date with regard to MySQL’s abilities, or with common utilities such as maatkit’s mk-duplicate-key-checker; with long-time solved bugs in MySQL and more.

But allow me to be clear that the presenter made very good points, and had a lot of insight with regard to improper practices and with common problems. I found the session to be interesting and good. The audience was actively participating, asking, suggesting or rejecting: this is always an indication for an interesting session!

I later joined the Partitioning in MySQL 5.1 session by Giuseppe Maxia & Sarah Sproehnle. I found the presentation to be in good spirits, and it shed some new light on some partitioning behavior I was wondering about. It also presented some utilities and use cases. I only attended the last 40 minutes or so of this session, but was very pleased.

Of course, the joke of the day was Sun’s acquisition by Oracle. So if Giuseppe was saying that “we are rather limited by working on InnoDB partitioning, since they’re not our guys – those who are developing InnoDB” – hey, now they are!

Anyway, Giuseppe sent some thick hints about an important announcement tomorrow, after which he will be free to discuss further issues. Will we all be sent home tomorrow, I wonder?

I’m not much into pondering about the acquisition. Ke sera sera, as the song goes. Looking forward for tomorrow’s announcement, though.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, will be a much busier day, with lots of interesting sessions, shorter ones. Besides, tomorrow’s the day when everyone get over their jet lag!

]]> http://code.openark.org/blog/mysql/mysql-users-conference-2009-daily-summary-monday/feed 6