Tag: community

Reducing my OSS involvement, and how it affects orchestrator & gh-ost

MySQL

I’m going to bring down my work volume around OSS to a minimum, specifically when it comes to orchestrator and gh-ost. This is to explain the whats and hows so that users are as informed as possible. TL;DR a period of time I will not respond to issues, will not review pull requests, will not produce releases, will not answer on mailing lists. That period of time is undefined. Could be as short as a few weeks, could be months, more, an unknown.

The “What”

Both orchestrator and gh-ost are popular tools in the MySQL ecosystem. They enjoy widespread adoption and are known to be used at prominent companies. Time and again I learn of more users of these projects. I used to keep a show-off list, I lost track since.

With wide adoption comes community engagement. This comes in the form of questions (“How do I…”, “Why does this not work…”, “Is it possible to…”), issues (crashing or data integrity bugs, locking issues, performance issues, etc.), suggestions (support this or that) and finally pull requests.

At this time, there’s multiple engagements per day. Between these two projects I estimate more than a full time job addressing those user interactions. That’s a full time job volume on top of an already existing full time job.

Much of this work went on employer’s time, but I have other responsibilities at work, too, and there is no room for a full-time-plus work on these projects. Responding to all community requests is unsustainable and futile. Some issues are left unanswered. Some pull requests are left open.

Even more demanding than time is context. To address a user’s bug report I’d need to re-familiarize myself with 5-year old code. That takes the toll of time but also memory and context switch. As community interaction goes, a simple discussion on an Issue can span multiple days. During those days I’d jump in and out of context. With multiple daily engagements this would mean re-familiarizing myself with different areas of the code, being able to justify a certain behavior; or have good arguments to why we should or should not change it; being able to simulate a scenario in my brain (I don’t have access to users’ environments); comprehend potential scenarios and understand what could break as result of what change — I don’t have and can’t practically have the tests to cover the myriad of scenarios, deployments, software, network and overall infrastructure in all users environments.

Even if I set designated time for community work, this still takes a toll on my daily tasks. The need to have a mental projection in your brain for all that’s open and all that’s to come makes it harder to free my mind and work on a new problem, to really immerse myself in thought, to create something new.

When? For how long?

Continue reading » “Reducing my OSS involvement, and how it affects orchestrator & gh-ost”

Pulling this blog out of Planet MySQL aggregator, over community concerns

MySQL

I’ve decided to pull this blog (http://code.openark.org/blog/) out of the planet.mysql.com aggregator.

planet.mysql.com (formerly planetmysql.com) serves as a blog aggregator, and collects news and blog posts on various MySQL and its ecosystem topics. It collects some vendor and team blogs as well as “indie” blogs such as this one.

It has traditionally been the go-to place to catch up on the latest developments, or to read insightful posts. This blog itself has been aggregated in Planet MySQL for some eleven years.

Planet MySQL used to be owned by the MySQL community team. This recently changed with unwelcoming implications for the community.

I recently noticed how a blog post of mine, The state of Orchestrator, 2020 (spoiler: healthy), did not get aggregated in Planet MySQL. After a quick discussion and investigation, it was determined (and confirmed) it was filtered out because it contained the word “MariaDB”. It has later been confirmed that Planet MySQL now filters out posts indicating its competitors, such as MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB.

Planet MySQL is owned by Oracle and it is their decision to make. Yes, logic implies they would not want to publish a promotional post for a competitor. However, I wish to explain how this blind filtering negatively affects the community.

But, before that, I’d like to share that I first attempted to reach out to whoever is in charge of Planet MySQL at this time (my understanding is that this is a marketing team). Sadly, two attempts at reaching out to them individually, and another attempt at reaching out on behalf of a small group of individual contributors, yielded no response. The owners would not have audience with me, and would not hear me out. I find it disappointing and will let others draw morals.

Why filtering is harmful for the community

We recognize that planet.mysql.com is an important information feed. It is responsible for a massive ratio of the traffic on my blog, and no doubt for many others. Indie blog posts, or small-team blog posts, practically depend on planet.mysql.com to get visibility.

And this is particularly important if you’re an open source developer who is trying to promote an open source project in the MySQL ecosystem. Without this aggregation, you will get significantly less visibility.

But, open source projects in the MySQL ecosystem do not live in MySQL vacuum, and typically target/support MySQL, Percona Server and MariaDB. As examples:

  • DBDeployer should understand MariaDB versioning scheme

  • skeema needs to recognize MariaDB features not present in MySQL

  • ProxySQL needs to support MariaDB Galera queries

  • orchestrator needs to support MariaDB’s GTID flavor

Consider that a blog post of the form “Project version 1.2.3 now released!” is likely to mention things like “fixed MariaDB GTID setup” or “MariaDB 10.x now supported” etc. Consider just pointing out that “PROJECT X supports MySQL, MariaDB and Percona Server”.

Consider that merely mentioning “MariaDB” gets your blog post filtered out on planet.mysql.com. This has an actual impact on open source development in the MySQL ecosystem. We will lose audience and lose adoption.

I believe the MySQL ecosystem as a whole will be negatively affected as result, and this will circle back to MySQL itself. I believe this goes against the very interests of Oracle/MySQL.

I’ve been around the MySQL community for some 12 years now. From my observation, there is no doubt that MySQL would not thrive as it does today, without the tooling, blogs, presentations and general advice by the community.

This is more than an estimation. I happen to know that, internally at MySQL, they have used or are using open source projects from the community, projects whose blog posts get filtered out today because they mention “MariaDB”. I find that disappointing.

I have personally witnessed how open source developments broke existing barriers to enable companies to use MySQL at greater scale, in greater velocity, with greater stability. I was part of such companies and I’ve personally authored such tools. I’m disappointed that planet.mysql.com filters out my blog posts for those tools and without giving me audience, and extend my disappointment for all open source project maintainers.

At this time I consider planet.mysql.com to be a marketing blog, not a community feed, and do not want to participate in its biased aggregation.

Remembering Jaakko Pesonen

MySQL

I was sorrowed to hear that Jaakko Pesonen has passed away after battling cancer.

I first met Jaakko a few years back, during a Percona Live conference, and as community goes, our paths crossed again a few times. He spoke at and attended conferences where we’d have casual chats.

We were both expats in the Netherlands for a period. As I moved in from Israel, he was already working at Spil Games, having relocated from Finland, his home country. We shared expat experiences and longings to our homes. One day he pinged me that he was planning a trip to Israel – and the next few days were all about planning the best culinary experience of his travel (he approved of the results).

He was happy for the opportunity to work for Percona, as this allowed him to move back home to Finland.

Jaakko had the biggest, widest, most consuming smile, and this smile will sure be the most vivid memory of him that I’ll keep.

I do not have personal pictures of Jaakko. This picture was taken by Julian Cash at Percona Live. A rare non-smiling appearance.

 

 

 

Discussing online schema migrations with Oracle’s MySQL engineering managers

MySQL

Last week I had the pleasant opportunity of introducing and discussing the operation of online schema migrations to MySQL’s engineering managers, as part of their annual meeting, in London.

Together with Simon J. Mudd of Booking.com, we discussed our perception of what it takes to run online schema migrations on a live, busy system.

While the Oracle/MySQL engineers develop new features or optimize behavior in the MySQL, we of the industry have the operational expertise and understanding of the flow of working with MySQL. In all topics, and in schema migration in particular, there is a gap between what’s perceived to be the use case and what the use case actually is. It is the community’s task to provide feedback back to Oracle so as to align development to match operations need where possible.

Our meeting included the following:

Need for schema migrations

We presented, based on our experience in current and past companies, and based on our friends of the community’s experience, the case for online schema migrations. At GitHub, at Booking.com and in many other companies I’m familiar with, we continuously deploy to production, and this implies continuous schema migrations to our production databases. We have migrations running daily; sometimes multiple per day, some time none. Continue reading » “Discussing online schema migrations with Oracle’s MySQL engineering managers”

MySQL Community Awards 2016: Call for Nominations!

MySQL

The 2016 MySQL Community Awards event will take place, as usual, in Santa Clara, during the Percona Live Data Performance Conference, April 2016.

The MySQL Community Awards is a community based initiative. The idea is to publicly recognize contributors to the MySQL ecosystem. The entire process of discussing, voting and awarding is controlled by an independent group of community members, typically based of past winners or their representatives, as well as known contributors.

It is a self-appointed, self-declared, self-making-up-the-rules-as-it-goes committee. It is also very aware of the importance of the community; a no-nonsense, non-political, adhering to tradition, self criticizing committee.

The Call for Nominations is open. We are seeking the community’s assistance in nominating candidates in the following categories:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2016

This is a personal award; a winner would a person who has made contribution to the MySQL ecosystem. This could be via development, advocating, blogging, speaking, supporting, etc. All things go.

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the year 2016

An application, project, product etc. which supports the MySQL ecosystem by either contributing code, complementing its behaviour, supporting its use, etc. This could range from a one man open source project to a large scale social service.

MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor of the year 2016

A company who made contribution to the MySQL ecosystem. This might be a corporate which released major open source code; one that advocates for MySQL; one that help out community members by… anything.

For a list of previous winners, please see MySQL Hall of Fame. Continue reading » “MySQL Community Awards 2016: Call for Nominations!”

Percona Live Amsterdam: Community Dinner, last updates

MySQL

Registration for the Percona Live Amsterdam conference community dinner at Booking.com is ongoing. Please note the following:

  • By Monday noon the kitchen will make the necessary purchasing. At this time we will have to give them a number, which we will not exceed.
  • The number we will give them is $(number of registrants Monday 12:00) + X, X being a constant
  • Those X tickets will be available until Tuesday 12:00
  • After which the registration is closed. We wish to avoid throwing away food, on one hand, as well as respect those who have reserved place and avoid running out of food, on the other.

Entry to the Booking.com building will be made available via Security personnel to those people who will be listed by the eventbrite registration. We will not be able to have last moment registrants; we will not collect money at the entrance; no credit cards accepted at the doorway.

If you’d like to attend the community dinner, please register now!

FYI Percona has arranged for boats to make the travel from the conference venue to Booking.com (no registration required, but room limited on those boats as well).

Now ain’t I being dramatic here. So happy to see everyone here in Amsterdam in a few days!

Percona Live Amsterdam: Community Dinner, Sep. 22nd

MySQL

Keeping up with tradition, there will be a community event held at the upcoming Percona Live Europe: Amsterdam 2015 conference.

This year, Booking.com will be hosting the event at the company’s headquarters in the heart of Amsterdam.

We will hold a community dinner (dish selection, includes vegetarian; beverages will be served) in our caffeteria and hope to add some spicy activities to the event!

Space is limited, and tickets can be purchased via Eventbrite.

Special thanks to Daniël van Eeden and Jean-François Gagné for their work in making this happen! Continue reading » “Percona Live Amsterdam: Community Dinner, Sep. 22nd”

“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; 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

Continue reading » “MySQL Community Awards 2015: the Winners”