Month: April 2015

“awesome-mysql” curated list created, open for pull requests

MySQL

Following up on popular “awesome-*” lists (e.g. awesome-python, awesome-golang etc.), I’ve created the awesome-mysql curated list.

This is a list of technologies (and resources) in and around MySQL, and means to serve as a place to find reliable software and info. I recently happened to notice there are some tools I’m familiar with that are unknown to others; tools unknown to me that are in good use.

The list is naturally and intentionally incomplete. I wish this to be a community based creation; so I put some categories and some tools. I left many out, deliberatey. Please assist by filling in the missing projects, tools, libraries! Additions gladly accepted via pull-requests. Do note the contribution guidelines (somewhat lengthy, I apologize).

I will moderate FUDs, promotional, commercials etc., and otherwise it may take some days for me to merge requests.

The work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Percona Live 2015: Reflections

MySQL

Some personal reflections on PerconaLive 2015:

Percona acquires Tokutek

Well done! Tokutek develops the TokuDB storage engine for MySQL and TokuMX engine for MongoDB. I will discuss the MySQL aspect only.

TokuDB was released as open source in 2013. It has attained a lot of traction and I have used it myself for some time. I met issues with locking or otherwise operational difficulties which I reported, and otherwise was fascinated by such features as great compression, online schema changes, and more.

Recently another company, InfiniDB, that also released its MySQL-backed codebase as open source, went out of business. I was afraid the same might happen to Tokutek.

I see Percona’s purchase as a very good move for the community. I saw a lot of TokuDB interest in Percona for some time now, and it is clearly interested in the technology. I expect they will add their own hands-on experience into the development of more operations-friendly features; put effort in solving locking issues (it’s been a while since I last checked, of course some of these may have been addressed by now). I am guessing they will work on a Galera/TokuDB integration and offer a “Toku-XtraDB-Cluster”.

TokuDB can compete with InnoDB in many places, while in others each will have its distinct advantage.

I see this is as good news for the community.

Community Awards and Lightning Talks

On a completely different subject, I believe it is commonly accepted that this year’s setup for the community awards & lightning talks was unsuccessful. The noise was astounding, human traffic was interrupting and overall this was a poor experience. We (Giuseppe Maxia, Kortney Runyan & myself) made a quick, informal brainstorming on this and came up with a couple ideas. One of which we hope to try in the upcoming Percona Live Europe – Amsterdam.

We apologize to the speakers for the difficulties.

Percona Live Europe – Amsterdam

Haha! Having recently relocated to the Netherlands I’m of course very happy. But regardless, Percona Live London was fun – and yet running on low fuel. I think it was a great idea to change location (and more locations expected in the future). This is the path taken by such conferences as OSCon, Velocity, Strata and more. Amsterdam in particular, as I’ve recently learned, is especially appreciated by many. I think this conf will do great!

Woz

And now for something completely different. Woz’ talk was that. I’m happy he came; I appreciate that he discussed education; and it was fun.

Percona Live 2015: Reflections; the Apache CCLA offer

MySQL

Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Alibaba, MariaDB, Percona team up and offer Oracle all public changes under the Apache CCLA

Read again please.

My one word summary of this is: Romantic. In the most positive sense.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer; this is my understanding of the current status and of the offer.

Summarizing the deal: the teams participating with WebScaleSQL would like to push code upstream. Current legal issues limit their options. Existing patches/contributions from Percona & MariaDB are licensed by GPLv2, which Oracle cannot import as it distributes a commercial, closed source, edition, in addition to its open source MySQL community edition.

So what happens is that there is a lot of free code, great patches, new features out there, that are only available via MariaDB or WebscaleSQL or Percona Server, but not in the Oracle MySQL code base. This, in turn, means Oracle re-implements many features originating from said companies. And, more importantly, said companies need to routinely rebase their code on new Oracle releases, repeating tedious work.

The offer is that Oracle agrees to the Apache CCLA as a license by which it would be able to incorporate contributions. Oracle would then be able to use incorporated code in both open source and commercial edition. Oracle will choose what code to incorporate; hopefully many patches will be accepted upstream, and the community will benefit from a rich featureset, rapid developed MySQL server.

Clearly a lot of work, persuasion, lawyer time, discussions etc. have been invested in this effort. I would like to add my humble +1/like/favorite/whathaveyou. You may add yours by letting Oracle know your opinion on the subject. Media tools are great for this.

 

 

MySQL Community Awards 2015: the Winners

MySQL

The MySQL Community Awards initiative is an effort to acknowledge and thank individuals and corporates for their contributions to the MySQL ecosystem. It is a from-the-community, by-the-community and for-the-community effort. The committee is composed of an independent group of community members of different orientation and opinion, themselves past winners or known contributors to the community.

The 2015 community awards were presented on April 15rd, 2015, during the community event at the Percona Live conference. The winners are:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2015

  • Daniël van Eeden
    Daniël has done great work on MySQL security and has continued to fantastically support MySQL User Group.NL. He has also logged a lot of bugs (and submitted patches), across all sorts of different MySQL products and has done a great deal to help improve the quality of MySQL.Daniël consistently provides extremely good feedback, on a wide range of features and products, from MySQL server security, through InnoDB, partitioning, and even on other products such MySQL Enterprise Backup and MySQL Enterprise Monitor. His bugs are always reported with a high quality, and many times he even includes a contribution to fix those bugs.
  • Justin Swanhart
    Justin has worked tirelessly for the past few years on some amazing projects of his own design, Shard-Query and Flexviews. Cross shard aggregation is an extremely complex thing to get right, and Shard-Query takes an interesting approach at this. Flexviews provides a materialized view framework, which is something that MySQL lacks to many people’s annoyance. Additionally Justin has also built some performance_schema related tools, reported many MySQL bugs, and has been a public speaker about MySQL in “can do” style.
  • Morgan Tocker
    In his day job, Morgan is Community Manager at Oracle. While some of his community interaction has been because of his job, he has gone far and beyond his corporate responsibilities. He is one of the most prolific writers on the MySQL Planet, he has been the most public face of MySQL, and he is always asking for feedback and showing a sincere concern for the Open Source community.For example, Morgan’s community polls on what defaults should be changed in MySQL 5.7 put some of the MySQL product decision making directly into the hands of the community. He is a key player on keeping the community and the MySQL developers at Oracle in touch with each other.

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the year 2015

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