As the dog days of summer set in and temperatures rise, this year’s O’Reilly OSCON conference in Portland, OR offered the open source community a brief respite from the heat. However, if you’re thinking the event lacked sizzle, think again. The energy, the discussions and the opportunities to collaborate, plus the chance to learn from/ interact with customers and potential customers, made OSCON one of the highlights of July.

While I’ve attended previous OSCON conferences while at MySQL AB, this was the first time I’ve attended as the CEO of SkySQL. My new role provided a different perspective, as well as new kinds of opportunities to interact with the open source community. There were plenty of terrific, formal presentations and Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, however, those from MySQL, MariaDB and Drizzle were especially noteworthy and informative. Here were a few high points:

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Since my last post I’ve changed how the table statistics work quite a bit in MariaDB. I ran into a few problems with my original changes. In the TiVo 5.0 patch the show table_statistics command chose from one of three hash tables to read from depending on the flags. There is a global hash table for global stats and two in the thd object for session and query stats. Each time a non show query is executed the query statistics are reset. In 5.1 the implementation of show command changed from reading arbitrary data structures to constructing queries to run against information_schema tables. The information_schema tables are constructed on the fly, placed into a temporary table and have the select resulting from the show command …

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.

The MariaDB Project is at OSCON 2011. We’ve got a booth, and we plan to also have a BoF session: Wednesday 27 July 2011 at room E142 at 8pm.

There will as usual be lots of black vodka (there was some yesterday at the MySQL BoF as well), and we’re going to talk about and celebrate the release of MariaDB 5.3.0 beta.

Come drop by the booth… we clearly have an interesting booth giveaway. And feel free to say hi to Kurt von Finck, Michael “Monty” Widenius, or Colin Charles who will be present, walking around, etc. Spot them in a MariaDB t-shirt of course!

The primary objective of this release was to radically improve performance for subqueries, as well as for joins and single-table queries over large data sets. The MariaDB 5.3 release is based on MariaDB 5.2 (and therefor, MariaDB 5.1 & MySQL 5.1).

Noteworthy improvements in this release include:

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Back in February I wrote an article titled A Small Fix For mysql-agent. Since then we did a few more fixes to the agent and included a Bytes Behind Master (or BBM) chart. For those who can't wait to get their hands on the code, here's the current version: MySQL SNMP agent RPM. For those who'd like to learn about it's capabilities and issues, keep reading.

What to Expect From this Version
The article I quoted above pretty much describes the main differences with the original project, but we went further with the changes while still relying on Masterzen's code for the data collection piece.

The first big change is that we transformed Masterzen's code into a Perl module, …

Unless you are Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), or one of his Hollywood buddies, you don’t need to read any further. Allow me to explain…

Over the weekend, we launched our new website. This type of announcement used to be interesting in the high-tech world. I heard Kara Swisher of the WSJ’s All things D speak at a MassTLC event in May.  She admitted back in the 1990s, when the web was just getting into high gear, that a new website from an interesting company might actually get some coverage. Not anymore.

I’ve also been told at all the SEO classes I’ve …

Until now, MariaDB 5.2 was lacking a yum repository for easy installs and upgrades. It is now available, thanks to OurDelta.

Just follow our very simple installation instructions.

It’s notoriously hard to measure the usage of open-source software. Software that’s open-source or free can be redistributed far and wide, so the original creators have no idea how many times it’s installed, deployed, or distributed. As a proxy, we often use downloads, but that’s woefully inadequate.

I’ve recently begun trying to figure out how many job openings are mentioning various open-source projects. I think that this might be a better metric because it’s driven by the end result (usage), rather than intermediate processes (downloads, etc). I think that it’s likely that usage and demand for skilled people is somewhat realistically related.

To be more concrete, I’ve been watching RSS feeds from job posting aggregators for several alternative versions of MySQL: Percona Server, MariaDB, and Drizzle. It appears that Percona Server is by far the most in-demand in terms of job skills. (I haven’t seen a job posting …

For MySQL it's a best practice to store IP addresses in a INT column rather than in a VARCHAR. This allows for more compact storage. This best practice is only for MySQL as PostgreSQL does have data types like inet and cidr.

MySQL is equiped with the INET_ATON() and INET_NTOA() functions since version 3.23.15. In MySQL 5.6.3 the INET6_ATON() and INET6_NTOA() functions were addes to finaly add IPv6 address support. To make it easier to work with IPv4 and IPv6 addresses the IS_IPV4_COMPAT(), IS_IPV4_MAPPED(), IS_IPV4() and IS_IPV6() functions were added. The difference between the new and old functions is that the old functions use INT UNSIGNED to store IP addresses and the new function uses VARBINARY(16) for IPv6 addresses and VARBINARY(4) for IPv4 addresses.

Here are some examples about how you could do …