5 years of MySQL

People often write a blog post when they reach some nice anniversary since they joined MySQL community. Well, for those old enough it usually means when they joined MySQL AB as employee. For me this was January 2008. Because I didn't remember the month correctly, I haven't blogged anything then, but decided to save it for a better opportunity - now.

TL;DR Starting this week I will be working for 10gen, selling MongoDB to the Nordics. This blog post is really long - even then it doesn't contain the most interesting stories, I'm not sure if they can ever be published. Sorry for the length, but remember you don't need to read all at once. This is my last MySQL post so save some of it for cold winter days!

2008 - Sun acquisition

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Below are the slides from my last talk at this Percona Live Worldwide MySQL Conference. The idea for this talk was proposed by my co-presenter Massimo Brignoli and goes back to a debate on this topic that went through the MySQL blogosphere during last Autumn - which in itself was sparked by an outstanding retrospective published about a MySQL failure at Github.

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MySQL Community Awards 2013 were announced earlier today at the MySQL Conference & Expo...

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It's time again to award persons, applications and companies in the MySQL Community. This is an annual tradition to highlight and give appreciation to some of the things that make MySQL so great.

The first awards were given out in 2005, and since 2010 the winners have been chosen by a community panel of which myself and Shlomi Noach are the co-secretaries. There has been a public nomination period in January and the final voting is done by a panel who are themselves former winners of the award.

The first category is

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the Year 2013

The first winner is...

Jeremy Cole

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Good morning Percona Live visitors! Attached to this post you can find a spreadsheet (both LibreOffice or Excel, as you prefer) that you can use towards the end of my tutorial. I've also attached the slides so you can download a copy of them.

I recently wrote about Where are they now: MySQL Storage Engines and The MERGE storage engine: not dead, just resting…. or forgotten. Today, it’s the turn of the MEMORY storage engine – otherwise known as HEAP.

This is yet another piece of the MySQL server that sits largely unmaintained and unloved. The MySQL Manual even claims that it supports encryption… with the caveat of having to use the SQL functions for encryption/decryption rather than in the engine itself (so,

This morning, this Percona XtraBackup bug came to my attention: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1170340 - basically, it’s now really quite tricky to determine if a MySQL server you’re connected to supports partitioning or not.

If you’re connected to anything less than MySQL 5.6, you can use have_partitioning variable. But since that’s gone in 5.6, you’re going to get a false negative if you’re connected to 5.6. You could use INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PLUGINS table, but that’s not there in 5.0, so you have some added workarounds to add there too.

A simple version check could be the solution… but what if you compiled the server without partitioning support?

I’ll be on a whistle-stop tour of California next week, including two presentations at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo.

On day one at 1:20pm I’ll be presenting CAP Theorem: Two out of three ain’t right, in which I will be challenging the popular ‘two out of three’ explanation of CAP Theorem, examining the evidence from a variety of experts, including Dr Eric Brewer.

Then on day three at 9:00am I’m very honoured to be providing a keynote presentation, The State of the MySQL Ecosystem.

Here’s an overview of the presentation:

It

I’m planning my calendar and thought I’d share what talks I’d be giving in Santa Clara in a couple of weeks for the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 and the MySQL & Cloud Database Solutions Day 2013. Its going to be a busy April 22-26 2013.

Here’s a solution to the not-so-long-standing issue of the Percona yum repo being broken for the CentOS 6 x86_64 version of the Percona-toolkit package. The repo listing is reporting an older version of the RPM which is not available on the site, so to fix this you just have to download the newer file and tell yum to add it locally. The side benefit is that you can use Yum to manage the RPM without adding the Percona repo, since the default settings for their repo could/have/had caused conflicts with Base Repo versions of MySQL packages; the Percona repo instructions set ‘enabled=1′ — not a great idea if you’re not setup to use the Yum priorities method of repo weighting.

So, if you see this after installing the repo via the instructions on their site:
Downloading Packages:

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 is almost 1 month away. It's time to start planning, set the expectations, and decide what to attend. This post will give a roundup of some of the sessions that I recommend attending and I look forward to.

First, the unexpected!

After much talk and disbelief, here they come! Oracle (http://www.mysql.com) engineers will participate to the Percona Live conference. This is wonderful! Their participation was requested by the organizers, by the attendees, and by community advocates, who all told the Oracle management how important it is to be in this conference. Finally, they have

Ayasdi emerges. Amazon slashes DynamoDB prices. And more

For 451 Research clients: Ayasdi applies TDA, machine learning and Hadoop twist to advanced analytics bit.ly/XYG0fZ By Krishna Roy

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) March 8, 2013

For 451 Research clients: Software AG launches In-Genius take on in-memory operational intelligence bit.ly/XYFI8G

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) March 8, 2013

For 451 clients: Anaplan lands $30m to accelerate growth, sets out expansion strategy under new CEO bit.ly/YMQ6gF By Krishna Roy

— Matt Aslett

We are very honoured to have been asked to give a “state of the MySQL” keynote presentation at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in April.

While this will not be in any way an official “state of the dolphin” presentation, I think it is fitting given the expansion of the MySQL ecosystem that the Percona Live event includes an independent perspective on the state of MySQL. The full title of the presentation – MySQL, YourSQL, NoSQL, NewSQL – the state of the MySQL ecosystem – reflects that.

We want to present an independent perspective on the health of the MySQL ecosystem in 2013, drawing on our research and analysis, as well as the views

DataStax and VoltDB launch their version 3.0s. And more

For 451 Research clients: DataStax adds security and manageability to distributed NoSQL database bit.ly/Vb1IiT

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) January 18, 2013

For 451 clients: LogiXML serves up fresh cut of BI stack with an eye to more embedded analytics deals bit.ly/SppzsH By Krishna Roy

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) January 21, 2013

Inside H-P’s Missed Chance To Avoid a Disastrous Deal – WSJ.com on.wsj.com/Td7wrh via @

451 Research’s 2013 Database survey is now live at http://bit.ly/451db13 investigating the current use of database technologies, including MySQL, NoSQL and NewSQL, as well as traditional relation and non-relational databases.

The aim of this survey is to identify trends in database usage, as well as changing attitudes to MySQL following its acquisition by Oracle, and the competitive dynamic between MySQL and other databases, including NoSQL and NewSQL technologies.

There are just 15 questions to answer, spread over five pages, and the entire survey should take less than ten minutes to complete.

All individual responses are of course

Oh yes, 2012 was an incredible year for the MySQL Community!
That’s why I would like to change the rules this year and I would like to offer you a new survey for this [Plus] reader’s choice 2012.

Community users, bloggers and events made the whole community last year, tell us how you used this community?
It will only take 5 minutes of your precious time, votes will be closed Jan. 31.

Vote for what you used! (with your heart, again…)

It is a new year and it's time again to start thinking of all the great people and companies that make the MySQL ecosystem so great. It is time to start thinking of this year's MySQL Community Awards.

Last year we had a record number of winners, eleven goblets were handed out! But behind the scenes things were even more exciting, there were several ties that forced the panel to do extra tie-breaking voting rounds. In one category we even had a 6-way tie! All of this just testifies to how much is happening in the MySQL world nowadays.

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Percona Live UK took place this week. It was the second year in a row and once again a great conference. Thank you Percona for bringing the show to Europe, it means a lot for the European MySQL community - many people who don't visit the Santa Clara conference were present in London. It's kind of funny, I even meet more Finnish MySQL users in London than I do at home!

I gave 2 talks. Slides are now posted on Slideshare:

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On Monday afternoon, Neal Armitage and I will be speaking at Percona Live in London. It will be a three hours tutorial about Tungsten replicator.

The contents of this tutorial are mostly new. We have released recently a new and easier way of installing different topologies, in the shape of cookbook scripts, which are distributed with the replicator tarball.

Using this cookbook, any user can simply install multiple topologies, from the simple master/slave to all-masters, fan-in, and star.

There are recipes for showing the replication cluster, switching roles between master and a chosen slave, taking over MySQL replication, installing direct slaves with parallel replication, testing each topology, and

The Winter season for conferences is catching up speed.

DOAG

As I write this the DOAG conference in Germany is happening. It is one of the biggest (or the biggest?) Oracle user group conferences outside of USA. Many of my European friends in the MySQL space are talking there. As you know I have been a big fan of Galera Cluster for MySQL for over a year now, but I was perhaps a bit of an early adopter. Lo-and-behold, I was surprised to see the DOAG related press-release from SkySQL puts the creators of Galera first in their headline: Codership, SkySQL und weitere Top-Experten rund um das Thema ‘MySQL Datenbanken” in Nürnberg

It's the time of the year again: You have 2 more weeks to submit a great proposal to the biggest and baddest MySQL Conference: Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (Santa Clara). Like many things in the MySQL community, this conference has also gone through a transformation over the past 3 years. But last year the growing pains and uncertainty ended with Percona putting up a great show. Attendance was up again (over 1000) and there was a sense of energy and excitement for the future of MySQL. If you are like me and like to dwell in nostalgia (so that you can get into the right mood for submitting great proposals) my coverage of last year's conference is found here: part 1,