Tag: Planet

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.

Impressions from MySQL conf 2011, part IV

MySQL

This post concludes my impressions from some of the talks I’ve been to.

Thursday

I opened this day’s sessions with a smile.

Antony Curtis and Arjen Lentz have authored the OQGraph storage engine a while back. I had every intention to try it out, but never got round to it. Which is why I was happy to find this session in the conference. OQGraph is a specialized engine, and comes to solve hierarchal or otherwise graph-related queries, such as: “who are the descendants of a given node”, “find a route from a to b”, etc. MySQL does not support the RECURSIVE syntax as Oracle does, and does not provide out-of-the-box solution for that.

The syntax is just excellent: you just write something like SELECT * FROM my_graph WHERE from_node = ’empusa fasciata’ AND to_node = ‘homo sapiens’ to find a route. Otherwise just use WHERE from_node = ‘Heathrow Central’ to find all outgoing links. So this is just plain old SQL, no new syntax involved.

I rounded corners. It is also possible (and required) to specify an algorithm. Do you want Djekstra? BFS? You specify it in the query. The result of a route query is a rowset, where each row is a step in the route, along with its sequence within the route. So you can do your ORDER BY, LIMIT etc. I find that syntax-wise, OQGraph is very intuitive! Continue reading » “Impressions from MySQL conf 2011, part IV”

On free and open blog posts: this post is free

MySQL

I’d like to criticize and stress some opinions on free and open blog posts, including such appearing on planet MySQL.

Some rants follow; skip if you’re only after technical stuff

1. On free reading

This post is completely free. You don’t need to pay or register to read it, not will you require to pass personal details to comment.

If you happen to see this post on some website, which only provides you with 1st couple of sentences, then asks you to login in order to view the complete text — you should know you need no registration to read this.

Continue reading » “On free and open blog posts: this post is free”

“Vote for me…” how to embed in WordPress

MySQL

[Clarification: I’m not actually asking you to vote for me :D, the title just follows a previous post]

Diego Medina has published a JavaScript code that can be embedded in your blog posts, and which allows for voting on Planet MySQL from within your blog.

Shared below is how to set this up for WordPress users. This is not a WordPress plugin, mind you. You’ll need to manually edit the WordPress template files (can be done from the Dashboard->Appearance->Editor->Single post).

The page you’re likely to edit is single.php, but depending on your template this can change. The explanation below assumes a single post page. This can also be worked out for your blog’s home page, which lists several entries.

Since there is no point in presenting the Planet MySQL voting widget for entries which do not relate to MySQL, the code verifies that the post is in the ‘MySQL’ category. You need to change this if your categorization differs. Mind that the category’s name is case sensitive. Continue reading » ““Vote for me…” how to embed in WordPress”