I was at Percona Live London 2011 these past two days. Very interesting conference. Good work Peter & team — you’ve managed to gather a good 300+ people at one venue in London. So full was the venue, that during today morning’s keynote I had to sit in the spillover room and miss out on Peter calling out my name :-) (no, Stewart and I were not drinking at 9am!)

Gave my session titled Why MariaDB? (slides). Pleasantly realized that there were many new faces. Better still, everyone has heard of MariaDB in the room. More interestingly is that a bunch of people are now also using MariaDB in production!

Had to rush through the last few …

Suomeksi: MySQL käyttäjätapaaminen Helsingissä 1. marraskuuta. Klikkaa allaolevaa linkkiä ilmoittautuaksesi, siellä saat myös lisätietoa suomeksi.

Finally it's here! So many of you have always asked about it. Markus and other Elisa guys. Osma and Ilkka at Habbo Hotel. And others... MySQL was born in Helsinki, InnoDB was born in Helsinki, a lesser known database / also MySQL engine called Solid was born in Helsinki, and 2 great replication companies, Continuent with multiple generations of clustering for MySQL, and Codership with Galera, are Helsinki companies. And amidst this embarrassment of riches, what did we not have?

A MySQL User Group.

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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, …

The Caryatids on the south porch of the Erechtheion (420 BC), Athens, Greece

I suppose I should probably say “MariaDB στην Ελλάδα” which, according to Google Translate, is Greek for “MariaDB in Greece”. We’re still finalizing the arrangements, but I’m pleased to announce that the next Monty Program-sponsored MariaDB Developer Meeting will be held in (or near) Athens, Greece. Update: See below for hotel/location information.

Monty Program tries to hold two MariaDB Developer Conferences / Monty Program company meetings each year. The most recent one was held in Portugal this past March and it’s past time for another one. Monty Program is a virtual company with employees scattered all around the world, and these meetings give us a chance to both get together with each other and to …

The information here was adapted from the AskMonty Knowledgebase.

There are two main parts to MariaDB and MySQL: The mysqld server and whatever client you use to interact with the server. The server is absolutely essential and must remain up and running. mysqld is normally very reliable, but there are rare occasions when it will fail. When mysqld fails hard (or core dump) it will, by default, write a stack trace in the 'hostname'.err file in the database directory. However, in some cases this is not enough to find out exactly what happened.

If you ever run into a situation where mysqld crashes and the 'hostname'.err file does not contain enough information for your DBA or support provider to diagnose the problem, you may need to use what is known as a "debug" build to produce a "full stack trace" and a core file. …

SkySQL executives and a number of its partners have been invited to share their insight and expertise on MySQL® technologies and trends during the Percona Live UK conference speaking program, including:

• "Linux & H/W Optimizations for MySQL", Yoshinori Matsunobu (DeNA), Oct. 24, 9:00AM

• "The SkySQL Reference Architecture in Action", Ivan Zoratti (SkySQL), Oct. 25, 2:30PM

• "Why MariaDB?", Colin Charles (MontyProgram AB), October 25, 3:30PM

Use discount code "PLUK11sky" and save 40 GBP when you register.

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 …

One thing which we, as developers of MariaDB, run into is that our personal database needs are not the same as many of our users. In fact, our needs are quite light compared to many. We have a MariaDB website, a company website, a knowledgebase, this blog, and that’s about it. None of them are particularly high traffic compared to what our customers have. But apart from talking to our customers, which are just a small percentage of the total MariaDB population, we wanted to have a way of finding out how MariaDB is used “in the real world”, so to speak.

Asking lots and lots of people to fill out surveys isn’t any fun, and we would have to keep repeating the survey ad nauseum to get useful information over time on trends and such. …

I just updated to Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric” on one of my desktops and I ran into an issue with MariaDB.

It’s not an issue with MariaDB itself, more in how the MariaDB “Natty” .deb packages are configured. We haven’t released .deb packages for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric”, but the Natty packages work fine, apart from this one configuration issue (and when we do release “Oneiric” packages, they will work out-of-the-box).

The main problem is that some things have moved around in “Oneiric” and Apparmor doesn’t like the MariaDB “Natty” Apparmor defaults file because it doesn’t account for some of the new destinations. Specifically, /var/run has been moved to /run (a discussion of the rationale behind the move can be found here). Other things have been moved too, but the /var/run to /run move is the one that is …