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.

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.

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.

With continuous deployment, we as Guardians of the Database do not wish to be blockers for the development cycle. On the contrary, we want to be out of the way as soon as possible, other than verifying a requested migration is safe. We wish to be able to deliver a migration at any given time.

Not all companies behave this way; some run a weekly aggregation of migrations. Others yet still use the Though Shall Not Pass DBA model. We tried to depict the various approaches with strong emphasis on our own approach, which is the most demanding of schema migration solutions.

The MySQL ALTER

We proceeded to discuss the in-house ALTER statement & InnoDB online DDL, and pointed out the limitations those impose on “online” operations to the effect of rendering these solutions unused by many. The serialization in replication stream means losing serving capacity, getting lagging replicas. The lack of escape path means a commitment into an hours worth of uninterruptible operation. The lack of resource control implies getting performance degraded throughout the operation.

We briefly touched on the TokuDB’s ALTER and how it worked.

Replication solutions

We discussed migrating via replication: running migrations on one or more replicas at a time, finally failing over onto a promoted replica once all replicas are updated.

We know this solution to be in use in companies such as DropBox, Etsy and others. We illustrated our own reasoning for not using this solution:

• Increased clock-time for running a migration: running a one-replica-at-a-time or few-replicas-at-a-time can double, triple, quadruple and so forth the overall migration time.
• Concurrent migration complexity: and since runtime increases, so does the likelihood of needing to run additional migration at the same time, which highly complicates the flow in a one-at-a-time or few-at-a-time model.
• Serving capacity: in this model some, or up to half the number of servers, are non operational. Serving capacity is reduced and we need to have more hardware to support that
• Failover: the failover is not smooth; it either includes some outage or some block time, and at any case noticeable in production. Having a planned failover once in a while is OK, but having a failover multiple times a day is too much of a hustle, in our current setup.
• Topology complexity: how our topologies always have some special cases, such as cross-DC replication with reduced cross-DC network traffic via intermediate masters, testing replicas with newer versions, developer-dedicated servers and others, that make shuffling of replicas around difficult to automate.

We have not discussed Galera’s Rolling Schema Upgrades as we personally do not have the experience of working with it. It solves the failover issue above, but given a “normal” replication tree under the cluster, same problems as above apply.

We concluded with our personal take, that like everything else, we just like to write stuff directly onto our masters, and let the natural replication flow deal with it and get our entire topology to be consistent.

Existing trigger based migrations

We drilled down into the algorithms behind pt-online-schema-change and Facebook’s OSC (the latter being rewritten today, not yet released as open source). We elaborated on the pains we saw in trigger based migrations: being unsuspendible, causing lock spaghetti, impacting write latency on the master to the point of a standstill on busy servers, being untestable.

gh-ost

I presented  gh-ost, our own, triggerless take on schema migrations. I discussed the logic behind gh-ost and how it decouples migration load from production load; the low impact the triggerless migration has on the master and on the entire replication chain, leading to low, subsecond replication lags throughout the migration and eliminating locking contention on the master. Basically the presentation Tom Krouper and I gave at Percona Live Amsterdam.

Want to Have

We followed up by a list of feature requests we could enjoy. These were largely technical issues gh-ost would benefit from, simplifying its behavior or ensuring its correctness in complex cases. We discussed dropping tables at end of migration, getting more info in the binary logs, GTID issues and more.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Morgan Tocker for officially inviting us to this gathering. There were quite a few familiar faces in the room, and it was a friendly gathering. Thank you to all the engineering managers with whom we met!

The discussion was lively, friendly and receptive. The Oracle engineers laid out the internals of the online DDL; some of their thoughts on the potential of the JSON format; gave advice on technical issues presented. I’d like to thank them for listening to our take on the subject. There was a discussion on the possible paths Oracle can take to improve online schema operations, and I’d like to thank Oracle for sharing their own thoughts and advice!

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.

Process of nomination and voting

Anyone can nominate anyone. When nominating, please make sure to provide a brief explanation on why the candidate is eligible to get the award. Make a good case!

The committee will review all nominations and vote; it typically takes two rounds of votes to pick the winners, and a lot of discussion.

There will be up to three winners in each category.

Methods of nomination:

• Send en email to mysql.community.awards [ at ] gmail.com
• Comment to this post
• Assuming you can provide a reasonable description in 140 characters, tweet your nomination at #MySQLAwards.

Please submit your nominations no later than Monday, February 29, 2016.

The committee

Members of the committee are:

• Baron Schwartz, Colin Charles, Daniël van Eeden, Davi Arnaut, Frederic Descamps, Geoffrey Anderson, Giuseppe Maxia, Justin Swanhart, Mark Leith, Morgan Tocker, Philip Stoev, Ronald Bradford, Santiago Lertora

Jeremy Cole and myself (Shlomi Noach) are acting as co-secretaries; we will be non-voting (except for breaking ties).

The committee communicates throughout the nomination and voting process to exchange views and opinions.

The awards

Awards are traditionally donated by some party whose identity remains secret. We are now securing the donation, but if you feel an urgent need to be an anonymous donator, please contact us in private, and thank you!

Support

This is a community effort; we ask for your support in spreading the word and of course in nominating candidates. Thanks!

• 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!

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!

Tuesday, September 22, 2015 from 6:30 PM to 10:00 PM (CEST)
Herengracht 597, 1017 CE
Amsterdam

Location: https://goo.gl/maps/06oOA

Walking route from conference venue: https://goo.gl/maps/Ocptu

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.

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.

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

• sys schema
  As PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA matured in the MySQL ecosystem, Mark Leith identified the need to condense its information around user-friendliness and visibility.  Out of this, the ps_helper and eventually MySQL SYS projects were born. This actively-developed, one-man project has become a standard integration in the MySQL distribution today.

• VividCortex
  VividCortex brings fresh and challenging ideas to the monitoring space, originally targeting MySQL. It provides near realtime information that was previously deemed unattainable through aggressive sampling and original statistical formulas that is raising the bar for monitoring high performance data stores at scale.

MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor of the year 2015

• WebScaleSQL Contributors: Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Alibaba
  It’s a common misconception, but WebScaleSQL is not a competitor to MySQL – it is strongly rooted in Oracle’s MySQL and closely follows its “upstream” MySQL codebase. Instead, it is intended as a place for several companies that were already collaborating on scalability improvements in MySQL to do so in a quicker and more succinct manner.

Congrats to all winners!

Committee members are:

• Baron Schwartz
• Colin Charles
• Frederic Descamps
• Geoffrey Anderson
• Giuseppe Maxia
• Marc Delisle
• Mark Leith
• Philip Stoev
• Ronald Bradford
• Santiago Lertora
• Jeremy Cole (Secretary)
• Shlomi Noach (Secretary)

Special thanks

Thank you to this year’s anonymous sponsor for donating the goblets!

Thank you to Colin Charles for acquiring and transporting the goblets!

Thank you to Santiago Lertora for working out the new swards website!

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 2015

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 2015

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 2015

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.

Process of nomination and voting

Anyone can nominate anyone. When nominating, please make sure to provide a brief explanation on why the candidate is eligible to get the award. Make a good case!

The committee will review all nominations and vote; it typically takes two rounds of votes to pick the winners, and a lot of discussion.

There will be up to three winners in each category.

Methods of nomination:

• Send en email to mysql.community.awards@gmail.com
• Comment to this post
• Assuming you can provide a reasonable description in 140 characters, tweet your nomination at #MySQLAwards.

Please submit your nominations no later than Saturday, February 28, 2015.

The committee

Members of the committee are: Baron Schwartz, Colin Charles, Domas Mituzas, Fredric Descamps, Geoffrey Anderson, Giuseppe Maxia, Marc Delisle, Mark Leith, Philip Stoev, Ronald Bradford, Santiago Lertora. A couple additional members pending.

Jeremy Cole and myself (Shlomi Noach) are acting as co-secretaries; we will be non-voting (except for breaking ties).

The committee communicates throughout the nomination and voting process to exchange views and opinions.

The awards

Awards are traditionally (as in this year) donated by some party whose identity remains secret. Thank you, kind sponsor!

Support

This is a community effort; we ask for your support in spreading the word and of course in nominating candidates. Thanks!