There was once a big hooplah about the MySQL Storage Engine Architecture and how it was easy to just slot in some other method of storage instead of the provided ones. Over the years I’ve repeatedly mentioned how this

I’d had some difficulty manually creating my own windows service for MariaDB (worked fine from the installer), but it was due to the way I was creating it, so I wanted to share the proper approach:

Old Way:

sc create "maria55" binpath= "\"C:/Program Files/MySQL/MariaDB 5.5/bin/mysqld\"
\"--defaults-file=C:/Program Files/MySQL/MariaDB 5.5/data/my.ini\""
DisplayName= "Maria55" start= "auto"

New Way:

sc create "maria55" binpath= "\"C:/Program Files/MySQL/MariaDB 5.5/bin/mysqld\"
\"--defaults-file=C:/Program Files/MySQL/MariaDB 5.5/data/my.ini\" maria55"
DisplayName= "Maria55" start= "auto"

The key is adding the name, maria55, after the –defaults-file=.. option, but still within the “” that belong to “binpath”.

This extra parameter exists so that mysqld knows whether or not it was started as a service or

I am very pleased to say that earlier today, SkySQL announced it has raised $4 Million in Series A Round Funding.

Let me post the main part of the press release here:

SAN JOSE – April 18, 2012 – SkySQL, the first choice in affordable database solutions for the MySQL® and MariaDB® databases in the enterprise and the cloud, today announces that the company has raised $4 million in Series A funding from a number of investors, including OnCorps, an elite peer-based community of veteran technology investors and advisors committed to bringing better, cost-disruptive technologies into the mainstream. Also funding the round are European investors including Finnish Industry Investment Ltd., Spintop Ventures and Open Ocean Capital.

SkySQL will primarily use the investment to fund growth in its new product development, including adding

Well, as you or may not have heard, MariaDB 5.5 (5.5.23) was declared GA last week!

It was only about 6-ish weeks ago that MariaDB 5.5 had been released as alpha, so the fact it’s already GA is excellent news for all MariaDB users (and MySQL 5.5 users looking to migrate).

Some of the 5.5 enhancements include:

• Significantly more efficient thread pool, comparable in functionality to the closed source feature in MySQL Enterprise.
• Non-blocking client API Library (MWL#192)
• @@skip_replication option (MWL#234)
• SphinxSE updated to version 2.0.4.
• “extended keys” support for XtraDB and InnoDB
• New INSTALL SONAME statement
• New LIMIT ROWS EXAMINED optimization.
• mysql_real_connect() Changes
  In MySQL, and in MariaDB versions before 5.5.21, mysql_real_connect() removes from the MYSQL object
  

This is another, in-case-you-missed-it, but it is definitely worth mentioning again:

MariaDB 5.3 is now GA

So, if you’re using MariaDB 5.1 or 5.2, I’d definitely recommend upgrading to the new MariaDB 5.3.

Also, if you’re a Windows user using MySQL 5.1, I’d highly consider making the switch to MariaDB 5.3 due to all of the Windows-specific improvements in it.

MariaDB 5.3 Enhancements:

• Subquery optimizations
• Semi-join subquery optimizations
• Non-semi-join optimizations
• Subquery Cache
• Subquery Optimizations Map
• Optimizations for derived tables and views
• Disk access optimization
• Join optimizations
• Index Merge improvements
• Optimizer control
• NoSQL-style interfaces
• Group commit for the binary log
• Replication and binary logging enhancements
• Microsecond support for NOW() and timestamp, time, and

In case you didn’t notice it last week, MariaDB 5.5 (5.5.20, specifically) has been released.

It’s a release I’ve been looking forward to for a while now, so I’m very excited that it’s now available!

Note that it is currently ‘alpha’ since it is the very first release of MariaDB 5.5. However, it is not your typical new ‘alpha’, so I would expect it to be GA in the not-so-distant future (please don’t quote me on this though, as I have no idea of the true time table – but the goal is for the next 5.5 release to be ‘beta’).

You can download MariaDB 5.5 from the following location:

http://downloads.askmonty.org/mariadb/5.5/

There are also more details on this

I just wanted to share my steps for building MariaDB 5.3 on Windows. (Note, this is not much different than the instructions Wlad posted here).

But, things are not always so smooth, and of course I ran into a couple small issues, so I wanted to share my outputs plus those issues and their solutions (once again many thanks go to Wlad!) for those out there who might encounter the same.

Here are the steps to build:

cd C:\mariadb-5.3

mkdir bld

cd bld

cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 9 2008"

cmake --build . --config relwithdebinfo --target package

Recently, I found myself needing MariaDB 5.1.60 for Windows for some testing purposes. Therefore, I needed to build it from source. I ended up using what I’d call a “blend” of the commands listed in this “how-to” and the readme file INSTALL-WIN-SOURCE, so I thought I’d post those steps.

cd C:\mariadb-5.1

win\configure.js

cmake .

MariaDB> select version();
+----------------------+
| version()            |

I’m often wondering what version of the InnoDB Plugin is included with which version of MySQL (or MariaDB). The MySQL changelogs used to denote which version of the InnoDB plugin was included with that particular release of MySQL, but sadly this is no longer the case.

Therefore I’ve compiled a comprehensive list which contains all of this info, and then some (and note all InnoDB Plugin changelog links are provided at the bottom).

Hope you find it helpful

MySQL 5.6:

MySQL 5.5:

OpenSQLCamp was a huge success! I took videos of most of the sessions (we only had 3 video cameras, and 4 rooms, and 2 sessions were not recorded). Unfortunately, I was busy doing administrative stuff for opensqlcamp for the opening keynote and first 15 minutes of the session organizing, and when I got to the planning board, it was already full….so I was not able to give a session.

• Comparing Non-Relational Databases: MongoDB, Tokyo Tyrant, CouchDB by Igal Koshevoy of Pragmaticraft
• Drizzle Client Rewrite – Clark Boylan leads the requirements and design discussion for rewriting the Drizzle Client
• Drizzle Plugin

The MySQL marketplace today is far more complex then simply choosing between a particular version of MySQL that Sun/MySQL (http://mysql.com) produces.
The MySQL server product in general is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2, however you should carefully review the MySQL Legal Policies (http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/) as a number of exceptions and different license agreements operate for companion tools such as MySQL Cluster, MySQL client libraries and documentation for example.

Looking into the MySQL ecosystem for products, I’ve produced the following categories:

• Sun/MySQL Official Products
  • MySQL Versions
• MySQL Variants
  • Community
  • Enterprise
• MySQL Plugins

Michael Widenius, commonly referred to as Monty, gave a very interesting talk on Maria at OSCON 2008. He not only had a talk in the main session, that was well attended, titled Architecture of Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (slides are available in ODP there), he also gave one at the Sun booth, where we were running our own little “unconference”.

For those reading this in a feed reader, there’s a 23 minute video of Monty telling us more about Maria, a bit about its motivations, architecture, and where the team is at now. If you’re interested in grabbing the code, check out the MySQL + Maria Storage Engine branch on Launchpad.

Day two of the conference was a little disappointing, as far as sessions went. There were several time blocks where I simply wasn’t interested in any of the sessions. Instead, I went to the expo hall and tried to pry straight answers out of sly salespeople. Here’s what I attended.

Paying It Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources

This was a talk focused on how MySQL has made it possible for community members to contribute to MySQL. There was quite a bit of talk about IRC channels, mailing lists, and the like. However, the talk gave short shrift to how MySQL plans to become truly open source (in terms of its development model, not its license). I think there was basically nothing to talk about there. I had a good conversation about some of my concerns with the speaker and some others from MySQL right afterwards.

Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design

Goals of Maria:

• ACID compliant
  
• MVCC, transactional
  
• default non-transactional and default transactional storage engine for MySQL
  
• MyISAM replacement, including temporary table use
  
• Storage engine good for data warehousing.
  
• Allow any length transactions to take place
  
• all indexes should have equal speed (clustered indexes are not in the plan)
  
• log shipping — incremental backups just by copying the logs
  
• used as a standalone library
  
• fast count(*)
  
• allow copying of Maria tables between different Maria servers
  
• Better blob handling (than MyISAM) — no memory copying, or extra memory used for
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

I’ll be following closely the progression of Storage Engines available in the MySQL Database server, well soon to be available when 5.1 gets to GA (hopefully by end of Q2 which is what we have been told). Tick, Tick, time is running out.

PrimeBase XT (PBXT) and Blob Streaming is obviously my clear focus, actually now working for PrimeBase Technologies, the company which I want to note for people is an Open Source company, committed at providing an open source alternative to the other commercial players. You also have at the MySQL Conference talks on the the existing InnoDB from Innobase (a subsidiary of market RDBMS leader Oracle). There is a