Here are a few questions remained open for me from Percona Live 2013 about things that have been said during keynotes; I will appreciate a discussion on comments. Here goes:

Question #1

Brian Aker (HP) asks Simone Brunozzi (Amazon) what the underlying technology for DynamoDB is. Simone says can't disclose. Brian says: "it's MySQL!!". Simone says: "can't disclose". Brian insists: "it's MySQL!!"

Seriously? I will be very much surprised to learn that DynamoDB uses MySQL; it doesn't make sense to me. Why would Brian Aker say that though? Did he just mean to tease Simone or is there something I just don't get?

(Yes, Brian?)

Question #2

Percona Live 2013 is shortly upon us, and it might be a good idea to watch for what's ahead of us.

Talks of interest

There is no way I can do justice to all. I wish to point out a small number of sessions I am personally interested in attending. I will not be able to attend them all, since there are too many sessions of interest and too few instances of myself (merely one).

I've tried to list some talks which are not absolutely obvious (when Peter Zaitsev speaks of MySQL performance, or Monty speaks about MariaDB, or Robert Hodges or Domas speak about replication -- well -- you're certain to have the ins and outs, right?). I can also expect Galera or Percona XtraDB Cluster talks to attract a lot of attention. There is a lot of good content for each.

But I was happy to

This post comes as response to 5 Tips for migrating your MySQL server to a Galera Cluster by Henrik Ingo (Galera), which is a good read. This post is a bit lengthy which is one of the reasons why I didn't just comment on said post.

The Galera talk in London was indeed well crowded, judging from my own chair. I think there is an obvious interest in Galera, as well as a general thirst for information from real-life experience. I am personally very interested in production stories; either "war stories" or "peace stories" - anything to shed more light on the adoption of this technology.

For disclosure, I have not tried Galera myself as yet. Not on production nor on staging machines. But here's a couple thoughts on Henrik's post:

A couple weeks ago I submitted Bug #67315: Crashing server by stored function referencing user defined variable in query. If you press that link, you can't see the bug (though I can as I submitted it).

This is due to Oracle's policy for security-related bugs. Tomas Ulin, Vice President MySQL Development at Oracle , was kind enough to discuss Oracle's policy with me, and these are the key points as I understand them:

Oracle's basic approach is to protect its customers. By publicizing security-bugs, Oracle's customers are vulnerable to black hatters attacks. Therefore Oracle takes measures and privatizes security bugs (crashing bugs can be treated as security bugs since a crash is a form of Denial of Service).

But what of a bug reported in a RC version, as was in my case? There is no strict policy

Here's the background: I'm testing many features of MySQL 5.6.7-RC due to two reasons:

• I'm verifying my common_schema installs and works properly on 5.6
• I promised I would present a 45 minute "what's new in MySQL 5.6" seminar in the upcoming OracleWeek (Israel)

In the case of common_schema, I have managed to find one weird bug (a behavior regression from 5.5) and one server-crashing bug, by merely running the project's tests, known to pass on 5.1 and 5.5 (and not utilizing any 5.6 features).

MySQL 5.6 offers the groundbreaking online DDL operations for InnoDB. Most common use cases will enjoy this feature, and the need for online alter table scripts will decrease. This is a killer feature!

I've put this new feature to the usability test. How did it go? Not too well, I'm afraid.

[Updates to this text inline], also see this followup.

sakila & DDL

sakila is still a very useful database. I say "still" because it is not very large, and computing power is getting stronger; yet on my laptop some operations can still take many seconds to

After playing a little bit with MySQL 5.6 (RC), and following closely on Giuseppe's MySQL 5.6 replication gotchas (and bugs), I was having some thoughts.

These are shared for a few reasons:

• Maybe I didn't understand it well, and someone could correct me
• Or I understood it well, and my input could be of service to the developers
• Or it could be of service to the users

InnoDB tables in mysql schema

The introduction of InnoDB tables in mysql makes for crash-safe replication information: the exact replication position (master log file+pos, relay log file+pos etc.) is updated on InnoDB tables; with innodb_flush_logs_at_trx_commit=1 this means replication status is

This is a yet-another compilation of the new MySQL 5.6 feature set. It is not a complete drill down. This list reflects what I believe to be the interesting new features user and usability -wise.

For example, I won't be listing InnoDB's split of kernel mutex. I'm assuming it can have a great impact on overall performance due to reducing lock contention; but usability-wise, this is very internal.

The complication is an aggregate of the many announcements and other complications published earlier on. See a reference at the end of this post.

Do note I am not using 5.6 as yet; it is in RC, not GA. I am mostly excited just to write down this list.

InnoDB

• Online ALTER TABLE: if there is one major new feature in 5.6 you would want to upgrade for, this would be it. Add

Even without attending the Percona Live conference in Santa Clara, you could tell something big was going on.

One way of measuring it was by looking at the flow of announcements. Here's a brief list, and apologies if I've missed anyone:

• Monty Program Announcing MariaDB 5.3. (and later Announcing MariaDB 5.5.23 GA)
• Tokutek Announcing TokuDB v6.0
• Twitter releasing its own MySQL fork
• Oracle announcing so many new features I can't list them all. But they made a

I'm giving thoughts on the viability of MySQL plugins. This is due to a particular experience I've had, which is thankfully solved. However, it left some bitter taste in my mouth.

MySQL plugins are a tricky business. To create a plugin, you must compile it against the MySQL version you wish the users to use it with. Theoretically, you should compile it against any existing MySQL version, minors as well (I'm not sure whether it may sometimes or most times work across minor versions).

But, most important, you must adapt your plugin to major versions.

Another option for plugin makers, is to actually not recompile it, but rather provide with the source code, and let the end user compile it with her own MySQL version. But here, too, the code must be compatible with whatever changes the new MySQL version may have.

And if it doesn't compile with the  [Read more...]

My previous post drew some attention, and in particular two comments I wish to relate to. I also wish to make a more fine-grained observation on visual editors.

One comment is by Peter Laursen, who rejected the generalization in my post, and another by wlad, who was harsher (but to the point), suggesting my post translated to "I don't know it, therefore it sucks".

I must have delivered the wrong message, since apparently people read my post as "don't use visual editors, they are bad for you", which is not what I intended to say, nor is it what I actually think. I took a very specific aspect of visual editors and commented on that. My comment should not extrapolate to "anything about visual

Students in my training classes usually prefer to use some kind of visual editor for MySQL. Typically this would be the software they're using at work. Sometimes they just bring over their laptops with the software installed. Or they would use MySQL Workbench, which is what I usually have pre-installed on their desktops.

I see MySQL Workbench, SQLyog, Toad for MySQL, or several more.

I always humbly suggest they close down their software and open up a command line.

It isn't fancy. It may not even be convenient (especially on Windows, in my opinion). And repeating your last command with a minor modification requires a lot of key stroking. Or you would copy+paste from some text editor. Most students will give it a shot, then go back to their favorite editor.

Well, again and again I reach the same conclusion:

Visual editors are not as  [Read more...]

I will be speaking at August Penguin 2011 (אוגוסט פינגווין), on August 12th in Ramat-Gan, Israel.

August Penguin is the annual meeting of Hamakor society: an Israeli society for Free Software and Open-Source Code (read more here).

I'll be holding a non-technical talk about MySQL, titled "MySQL and the Open Source Sphere". In this talk I will be presenting my impressions of the nature of open source development of MySQL and surroundings: the core server, the various forks, patches, 3rd party tools, companies involved, etc. So this is a general "get to know who's

Here’s a few thoughts on current status and further possibilities for Facebook’s Online Schema Change (OSC) tool. I’ve had these thoughts for months now, pondering over improving oak-online-alter-table but haven’t got around to implement them nor even write them down. Better late than never.

The tool has some limitations. Some cannot be lifted, some could. Quoting from the announcement and looking at the code, I add a few comments. I conclude with a general opinion on the tool’s abilities.

“The original table must have PK. Otherwise an error is returned.”

Development, Middleware, [Oracle] Database, BI, ERP, CRM, SCM, EPM, SOA & BPM, Java, Security — all these and more are on the schedule. No MySQL track, not a single MySQL session.

Lack of speakers? Hardly. Lack of public interest? I can’t imagine.

Then what is it? I have no information, and don’t want to throw around suggestions.

Reading the convention’s objectives, I see nothing to suggest why MySQL would not be in. Heck, there’s even two new special seminars: “Family Economy” and “Career planning“.

Sorry, not providing a link this time (besides, it’s all Hebrew). If you’re eager to look it up, google for “Oracle week Israel”.

It’s a shame, and makes it harder to answer the “so what do you think Oracle will do to MySQL?” question I get to be asked ever so often.

MySQL@Facebook team have recently published an Online Schema Change code for non blocking ALTER TABLE operations. Thumbs Up!

The code is derived from oak-online-alter-table, part of openark-kit, a toolkit I’m authoring. Looking at the documentation I can see many ideas were incorporated as well. And of course many things are different, a lot of work has been put to it by MySQL@Facebook.

openark-kit is currently released under the new BSD license, and, as far as I can tell (I’m not a lawyer), Facebook’s work has followed the license to the letter. It is a strange thing to see your code incorporated into another project. While I knew work has begun on the tool by

I’m evidencing an increase in the planning, confidence & execution for MyISAM to InnoDB migration.

How much can a single consultant observe? I agree Oracle should not go to PR based on my experience. But I find that:

• More companies are now familiar with InnoDB than there used to.
• More companies are interested in migration to InnoDB than there used to.
• More companies feel such migration to be safe.
• More companies start up with an InnoDB based solution than with a MyISAM based solution.

This is the way I see it. No doubt, the Oracle/Sun deal made its impact. The fact that InnoDB is no longer a 3rd party; the fact Oracle invests in InnoDB and no other engine (Falcon is down, no real development on MyISAM); the fact InnoDB is to be the default engine: all these put companies at ease with

I would like to get the community’s opinion about supporting older (minor) versions of MySQL in open source projects.

If I were to develop some open source project, and a bug report came which only applied to MySQL 5.0.51 (but more recent versions worked fine), would I need to fix the code so as to support this older version?

How about supporting 5.0.22 (released almost 4 years ago, with almost 70 revisions since)? Would you expect an open source project to support this MySQL version because, say, this is the default version in your yum repository?

I would like to concentrate on the currently stable MySQL versions: 5.0 and 5.1. Versions

After seeing quite some SQL statements over the years, something is bugging me: there is no consistent convention as for how to write an SQL query.

I’m going to leave formatting, upper/lower-case issues aside, and discuss a small part of the SQL syntax: table aliases. Looking at three different queries, I will describe what I find to be problematic table alias use.

Using the sakila database, take a look at the following queries:

Query #1

SELECT
 R.rental_date, C.customer_id, C.first_name, C.last_name
FROM
 rental R
 JOIN customer C USING (customer_id)
WHERE
 R.rental_date >= DATE('2005-10-01')
 AND C.store_id=1;

The above looks for film

Though most probably I won’t be there in person, here’s what I expect to hear from Edward Screven, Oracle, on the State of the Dolphin keynote, coming MySQL Conference & Expo.

I’m under the assumption that no shocking news are delivered. That is, that for the near future, it’s business as usual for MySQL.

Last year’s great message, delivered by Karen Padir, was “more community”. More community participation, more community patches. Looking back, I’m not sure I saw that coming true. The 5.4 version was announced at that same conference, and was criticized for being community-oriented yet community-hidden. The latest 5.5 milestones

I like milestone based release models.

The advantages I find in this model are in particular beneficial for MySQL. What I find good about this model are:

• Things are unstable for shorter periods. Even if some feature is not full stable in some milestone, the model encourages that such a feature is fixed on higher priority.
• It is easy to create a priority ranking for new features. Moreover, priorities are expressed more by chronological time of development, less by “how many people are working on it”.
• The model pushes towards rapid development, since you can’t release M5 before M4 is complete.

The last versions of MySQL took long time to complete. Take 5.1, for example: partitioning and event scheduling were long considered GA before row-based replication was half stable. Consider the so small but