I was at FOSDEM for the first time this year and it was very exciting.
I was very glad to see Percona, MariaDB and Oracle together.
If you’ve never been at FOSDEM, I recommend you to join us next year, this is truly a magical event!

You can find some of the slides on [Plus], enjoy! :

If you would like to add your slides, post a comment with the link.
And remember to visit this page for more slides about MySQL : http://www.mysqlplus.net/mysql-docs/

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It’s time to unveil the winners of the [Plus] readers choice awards!
Thank you again for your votes, remember that the real winner was the community, again.

I asked you to vote for what you used in 2012 and you’ve voted with your heart.
Here are the final results, congrats to the lucky guys and teams :

The most useful blogs in 2012 :

MySQL Performance Blog

The MariaDB Blog

SkySQL Blog

Ok, the Percona team members provides the best technical blog about MySQL (and more), this year again. Of course, this blog is very useful and interesting, I recommend to read the comments too, they are often very informative.

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FOSDEM 13 is now over, I am on my way home and I would like to share some thoughts sparkled by the intense atmosphere that I have lived in these two days in Brussels.

I have to admit, I was tempted to skip FOSDEM this year: the last 3 weeks have been crazily busy and I travelled a lot, leaving my family alone for too long. But now I am glad I made the effort.
For once, I will leave the comments around the MySQL talks to others, I am sure there will be posts on the matter. In this post I want to cover some of the non-MySQL talks and discussions I have attended and heard. Of course the topics that have been discussed are still relevant for MySQL and for the future of the MySQL ecosystem.
First of all, the number of attendees was impressive. The organisers claim there were more than 5,000 open source enthusiasts,



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This weekend I am supposed to be giving a talk at FOSDEM on Libdrizzle.  Unfortunately my kids and I all fell ill on Thursday (my wife appears to be immune) so I had to cancel my plans (infecting 5000 people didn't seem wise :)

Instead I am writing this blog post about Libdrizzle and my part in it which covers some of what I was going to talk about.

History of Libdrizzle

Libdrizzle started out as a from-scratch C connector for Drizzle and MySQL originally created by Eric Day.  It was designed to be high performance and use common standards to make it easy to work on.  In the summer of 2010 it was merged into the main Drizzle tree where development has been focused.  There were several attempts to split it out again but until now none were truly successful.

For a few





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February is turning out to be a busy month. I’ll be giving a talk about MariaDB at the SkySQL Solutions Day in Hamburg, alongside Sergei Golubchik. This happens February 1 2013.

I’ll also be in Brussels for FOSDEM and presenting at the MySQL & Friends devroom. Here I will talk about MHA and how you can get automated MySQL failover. I’ll also be hanging out at the CentOS booth with Karanbir Singh giving away MariaDB stickers all weekend. If you’re at FOSDEM, don’t forget to sign up for the

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FOSDEM is a free event that offers open source communities a place to meet, 
share ideas and collaborate.
It is renowned for being highly developer-oriented 
and brings together 5000+ geeks from all over the world.

 
This year again, be sure that FOSDEM will be the place to be in February!

Do you have any doubts? Really ? Dude, repeat after me :

Free event

During a week-end

Beer

5000+ open source geeks

Beer

MySQL and Friends devroom

NoSQL devroom

No registration needed (open source man!)

Ok, that sounds good?

Well, here are the informations to attend this terrific event :

• How to register? : Are you kidding me?
• When : 2 & 3 February 2013 (Hurry up guys!)
• Where : Brussels (beers!!!)

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Libdrizzle is getting better and better with every release, and to reflect this we have two announcements to make.

First of all, Libdrizzle 5.1.2 has been released.  This release has several major bug fixes and performance enhancements.  Changes are as follows:

• Non-blocking Windows connections are now more stable
• Improvements to Windows building
• Unix Socket connections are now more stable
• Memory allocation/freeing cleanups (for performance and ease of code)
• Network packet buffer now much more flexible
• Many performance improvements (the bundled drizzle_binlogs tool is now around 10x faster on my i7 laptop)
• Several other minor bug fixes

API chages:

• drizzle_query_str() has been removed, drizzle_query() with a 0 byte length parameter now does the same thing.

As



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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…)

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit

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I may not work on many MySQL related things any more but there are some MySQL ecosystem events that I am participating in.

First there is Percona Live London.  This event is on the 3rd and 4th of December at The Millennium Gloucester Conference Centre.  At this event I will be giving a talk on MySQL Compatible Open Source Connectors.  This will cover alternatives to the standard connectors and how to use them, it will be useful if you find the licensing behind the standard connectors prohibiting.  There is also a 40% off discount code you can use when registering, simply enter the promo code "Come2mytalk".

On the 2nd and 3rd of February is



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Frédéric Descamps of Percona.

Percona Toolkit is Maatkit & Aspersa combined. Opensource and the tools are very useful for a DBA.

You need Perl, DBI, DBD::mysql, Term::ReadKey. Most tools are written in Perl, and whatever is in Bash is being re-written in Perl. There is also a tarball or RPM or DEB packages.

Know your environment. The hardware & OS are crucial for you to know. How much memory/CPU do you use? Do you use swap? Is this a physical/virtual machine? Do you have free space? What kind of RAID controller? Volumes? Disk? What about the network interfaces? What IO schedulers are used? Which filesystem is the data stored on? To answer all that, just use pt-summary.

Know your MySQL

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Sergey Petrunia of the MariaDB project & Monty Program.

MySQL 5.5 GA at the end of 2010. MariaDB 5.3 RC towards the end of 2011 (beta in June 2011).

MySQL 5.5 is merged to Percona Server 5.5 which included semi-sync replication, slave fsync options, atuomatic relay log recovery, RBR slave type conversions (question if this is useful or not), individual log flushing (very useful, but not many using), replication heartbeat, SHOW RELAYLOG EVENTS. About 2/3rds of the audience use MySQL 5.5 in production, with only 2 people using semi-sync replication.

MariaDB 5.3 brings replication features brings group commit in the binary log, which is merged into Percona Server 5.5. Checksums for binlog events which is merged from

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Giuseppe Maxia of Continuent and long time creator of MySQL Sandbox.

Only works on Unix-like servers. Works with MySQL, Percona & MariaDB servers. MySQL server has the data directory, the port and the socket – you can’t share these.

To use it: make_sandbox foo.tar.gz. Then just do ./use.

$SANDBOX_HOME is ~/sandboxes. You can also create ~/opt/mysql/ and if you have MySQL 5.0.91 binary in that directory, you can just do “sb 5.1.91″.

Sandbox has features to start replication systems as well. You can have varying master/slave setups with varying versions as well (good idea to test from MySQL -> MariaDB master->slave for migration).

You can now also play with

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Steve Hardy of Zarafa.

Work that has been done to make Zarafa better. Why do you optimise your buffer pool? To decrease your I/O load. How can you do it? Buy more RAM, page compression, less (smaller) data, rearrange data.

MariaDB or Percona Server allows you to inspect your buffer pool (unsure if this is now available in MySQL 5.6). Giuseppe in the audience says this is available in MySQL 5.6, but Steve used this on MariaDB 5.2.

Strategies to fix it: Make records smaller. Remove indexes if you can use others almost as efficiently. Make records that are accessed around the same time have a higher chance of being on the same page. Use page compression. Buy more RAM. Try Batched Key Access

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Stéphane Combaudon of Dailymotion.

Index: separate data structure to speed up SELECTs. Think of index in a book. In MySQL, key=index. Consider that indexes are trees.

InnoDB’s clustered index – data is stored with the Primary Key (PK) so PK lookups are fast. Secondary keys hold the PK values. Designing InnoDB PK’s with care is critical for performance.

An index can filter and/or sort values. An index can contain all the fields needed for the query you don’t need to go to the table (a covering index).

MySQL only uses 1 index per table per query (not 100% true – OR clauses), so think of a composite index when you can. Can’t index TEXT fields (use a prefix). Same for BLOBs and long VARCHARs.

Indexes: speed up queries, increases the size of your dataset, slows down writes. How

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Oli Sennhauser of FromDual.

Synchronous multi-master replication with the Galera plugin. Your application connects to the load balancer and it redirects read/write traffic to the various MySQL Galera nodes. Tested a setup with 17 SQL nodes and you can have even more. Scaling reads and also a little bit for scaling writes is what Galera is good for.

If one node fails, the other two nodes still communicates with each other and the load balancer is aware of the failed node.

Why Galera? There is master-slave replication but its not multi-master, and its asynchronous and you can get inconsistencies. There is master-master replication but its asynchronous and can have inconsistencies and conflicts if you write on both nodes. MHA/MMM/Tungsten are

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Mark Riddoch of SkySQL.

This was a talk about the future in general. What people would like. Etc. Not about something that exists yet, hence the sparse notes.

Trace statements are good for the “why”. You move on to the debugger, but what is a useful SQL debugger? Profilers addresses the “when”.

SQL developer tools: manually run queries (traditional route for development, effective way to test SQL statements, some indication of performance), server logs (alerts developers of serious issues like the slow query log – identify poorly written queries, requires server access, not effective in a cloud environment (?)), external monitoring (network sniffing of connection packets, Ethereal dissectors – allow individual connections to be traced, no

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Ralf Gebhardt of SkySQL.

Cluster: shared nothing architecture (no single point of failure), synchronous replication between nodes, ACID transactions, row level locking. In-memory storage (some data can be stored on disk, but indexes must be in-memory). Checkpointing to disk for durability. It supports two types of indexes – ordered T-trees, unique hash indexes. Online operations like adding node groups, software upgrades, table alterations. Quick standard architecture diagram displayed about MySQL Cluster.

Network partitioning protocol is designed to avoid a split brain scenario. Is there at least one node from each node group? If not then this part cannot continue – graceful shutdown. Are all nodes present from any node group? If so, then this is the only viable cluster – continue to operate. Ask the

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First talk at FOSDEM MySQL Devroom by Oli Sennhauser, of FromDual. Quick notes/liveblog of the talk, plus links from a quick search.

New Release Model: starts with at least in beta quality, milestone releases are RC quality (every 3-6 months), between milestones new features are allowed, GA releases every 12-18 months, no more than 2 releases in active support. There is also MySQL Labs, in where features can make it into a release model, but not necessarily.

Oli’s guess: MySQL 5.6 GA in April 2012 (Collaborate) or June 2012. As a consequence, MySQL 5.0 and MySQL 5.1 will be EOL probably by April this year.

New improvements in partitioning: explicit partition selection, exchanging partitions (good for ETL jobs).

New improvements in InnoDB: InnoDB

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I’m about to head to Paris to present at the February meetup of the MySQL User Group in Paris, France. It happens 1st February from 6-8pm at the Patricks Irish Pub. Its free to attend, and I understand that SkySQL keeps this event afloat.

I’m also heading to my first FOSDEM right afterwards and will definitely hang out at the MySQL & Friends Devroom. There is an amazing lineup of speakers, with all talks being about 25-30 minutes, it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun. To boot, Michael “Monty” Widenius will also be there, so expect lots of Salmiakkikossu.

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The MySQL DevRoom at FOSDEM is ready. The schedule has been voted. Thanks to all who have participated. Now, let's make sure that the event is successful. The schedule is juicy, and not only because I have three talks in it! Sunday 2012-02-05 Event Speaker Room When All you need to know about migrations and you never dared to ask Ralf Gebhardt   [Read more...]

There is a room dedicated to MySQL at FOSDEM 2012. (Thanks to @lefred for organizing). The CfP has received 37 submissions, but there will be time slots only for 12 to 15 talks. So now it's up to the community. If you want to attend a particular talk, you should vote for it. Like in previous years, the selection of the talks is public. You can see the list of the proposals, with the instructions, which I repeat here. You can vote either publicly, using Twitter, or privately, by sending an email. Each talk proposal will be referred by the number  [Read more...]

It's that time of the year where MySQL would be speakers are called to action. As usual, the main event is the MySQL spring conference, this year hosted by Percona. The call for participation to the MySQL Conference And Expo 2012 is still open until December 5th. To submit a proposal, you should register as a speaker and then fill in the form.
There is a conference committee which is already busy evaluating the proposals that have been submitted so far. The committee is demanding (I know for a fact, since I am in it!) and therefore, if you want to submit something, be very critical with yourself and
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on Friday evening , apparently having a confirmed reservation in a resto is not enough to actually be welcome at that restaurant.

at DrupalDevdays, only 2 laptops were open during our presentation

at DrupalDevdays, almost nobody in the room was already using CI

at Fosdem , the parking lot is full before 11:30 on a saturday

at Fosdem , much less Macs than last years .

at Fosdem , way too much rooms are already at full capacity so you need to have 2-3 backup alternatives ..

at Fosdem , people expect me to be in certain rooms, at the same time

at Fosdem , even with too much rooms already full one still misses a bunch of interresting talks

at Fosdem , one doesn't even realize friends are speaking there too ..

at Fosdem , Android is the standard ...

at Fosdem , you are confronted with the fact you probably forgot

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I admit .. I`m lazy ... unlike last year I did not organize MySQL and Friends meetup at Fosdem.

I outsourced it to Kenny

More info and registration here