I just finished reading a couple of interesting, and somewhat related, blog posts which I think are worth sharing (apologies to anyone who has already seen them). One is from Jelastic and the other is from Michal Hrušecký.

I’ve written about MariaDB and the Jelastic cloud before (see MariaDB now available as a hosted database via Jelastic cloud platform). Now Jelastic has published statistics on the relative popularity of the various databases they offer. The good news is MariaDB is currently the database of choice for 14% of their customers. The bad news is that we’re in fourth place behind their other three database choices (MySQL, …

As I promised a week ago, I’m publishing results of my little MySQL survey. Question that people (including me) are probably the most interested in is what variant(s) of MySQL are people using. No big surprise is that the most used variant (89%) is MySQL Community Server from Oracle. It’s well known default, people know what to expect and administrators golden rule is don’t touch it if it works. And other variants build on top of it anyway.
Second place (20%) belong to MariaDB. That is answer I also kind of expected. MariaDB guys are verbose and visible. At least I saw much more people talking about MariaDB then about Percona. Part of it might be that they position themselves as kind of MySQL competitor. Oracle is big controversial company. Sometimes we hate them (they killed OpenOffice!), sometimes we love them …

In openSUSE we’ve got currently MySQL Community Server, MariaDB and MySQL Cluster. From all of these we have even multiple versions. Although these packages are different, they are quilte similar. So I’m handling them in a little bit special way.
When I was adding MariaDB I knew that packaging will be quite similar to the MySQL Community Server. So I took some parts of .spec file away into separate files so I can sync them easily and left only package dependent parts in .spec files. Later on, I created special git repository and few scripts to handle patches and patch sharing among these variants. And lately I automatized tre rest of the manual syncing I was diong. So today I want to present how do I do MySQL packaging today. And that is also some tutorial on how you can modify these packages easily or even create packages for other variants like Percona
Everything starts with …

Last time I described how to contribute quite to any package in openSUSE Build Service. But I left out the most important part. I haven’t shown how to change anything. This time I want to show you, how to create patches, if you need them, easily. Let’s start start with package we checked out from obs. Creating patch for anything is different only in first few steps.
First we got to the directory where do we have the package checked out. We run

quilt setup

This command will parse the .spec file, unpack tarball and prepare all quilt stuff. Now is time for patching, so let’s enter the newly created directory and try following command

quilt push

You know that in .spec there might be some patches. quilt push will take first patch that is not applied yet …

I promised that I’ll write a post about how you can contribute. There are several ways how to contribute to MySQL, but most of it means modifying packages. And as everything in openSUSE is built using openSUSE Build service, first post will be actually pretty general obs and osc howto. In the next posts, I’ll go deeper into specific details of MySQL packaging.

Find the package

If you want to play with any package in openSUSE Build Service, you need to have a Novell login and preferably the osc command line client for obs. You can do most of the stuff from web as well, but this way is more comfortable So let’s say that we want to play with MariaDB. First we have to find package we want to update. This can be easily done on the web. Just take a look at packages at server:database repository. mariadb is …

Earlier today I asked on this blog and everywhere else people to fill in a simple survey of how do they use MySQL, which one and what should I focus on. I already have more than 30 answers (don’t stop answering, keep providing more) so I will have to publish the results and do something with them. But first I’ll let the survey run for at least a week Oh, and even though I write MySQL, this post is general about all MySQL variants (MariaDB, MySQL Cluster, … (not counting Drizzle)).
Now what is behind this survey? Well, I have a lot of stuff to do and MySQL is not my only responsibility. And I know that sometimes it can use some extra hands. Sometimes I get lucky and we have new beta packaged same day as it …

This is not really a blog post. I just would like to know you opinion on state of MySQL at openSUSE and openSUSE Build Service. But I’m interested in your feedback even if you are not using openSUSE or even if you are not using packages I provide. As my TODO is quite long and I can’t do everything, I would like to know what should I pay the most attention to. Later I will publish a post about the current state of MySQL and how you can participate

Opscode appoints a new CEO. SugarCRM gains a new CFO. And more.

# Opscode named Mitch Hill as CEO, with Jesse Robbins becoming Chief Community Officer.

# SugarCRM claimed billings up 58% in Q2 and appointed a new CFO.

# Tasktop released Tasktop Dev 2.1 and announced Tasktop Sync 1.0.

# Pentaho delivered improved support for Hadoop …

If you’re on openSUSE, you definitely want to upgrade to the latest MariaDB release made on 19/07/2011. Previous security fix disabled XtraDB! This is MariaDB 5.1.55.

If you’re using Gentoo, please test MariaDB 5.2 ebuilds in the MySQL overlay. Its current with MariaDB 5.2.7 as well as MariaDB 5.1.55.

One of the great things we’ve got at openSUSE is openSUSE Build Service. Web service where we can commit sources and recipes and it will produce bunch of binaries for various distributions. Not just for openSUSE. We are friendly people and we love to work together with other distributions. After all, we all have a common goal – make open source succeed and defeat common enemies (some greedy people trying to steal some of our freedoms). OBS follows this path and it is a great tool that can help anybody to package his software for any distribution. It is easy to use and easy to get involved. We even have a public instance where anybody can submit a data and use package for his own purpose. If you want to build a package just for Fedora, we will let you do that. Of course we will be much happier if you’ll consider building it for openSUSE as …