These were my notes from the “Where is MariaDB today?” session at the Lisbon MariaDB Developers Meeting that happened in March 2011. I just realised I hadn’t posted it; also note that it is really raw.

Where is MariaDB today?

5.3 – look at the KB article titled “MariaDB 5.3 TODO“. A lot of things are in the review state at the moment.

Sergei has all the phone home code for the server working; what is missing is a host to collect the data, and also have a website to display things (Holyfoot will work on this).

Mark Callaghan says there are at least two different implementations of group commit work now, and Percona might have a third. This is in relation to Kristian Nielsen’s work. World’s largest workload on group commit is probably at Facebook — Mark’s implementation is in the Facebook patch. Mark wants to make sure that …

As is tradition after the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo, there tends to be a storage engine summit right afterwards. This year it was expanded to also include plugins. I must graciously thank Facebook for hosting us at their campus, and giving us a rather healthy lunch, plus fueling us with all those drinks, caffeine and snacks that we needed to keep us going. While standing in the doorway, Mark (Callaghan) pointed to us that a certain other Mark (Zuckerberg) was walking into the campus, just like the rest of us.

The very raw notes are up on the Knowledgebase - Plugins & Storage Engines Summit for MySQL/MariaDB/Drizzle 2011. We definitely did not discuss anything Drizzle related, and we barely had time to focus on plugins, so the …

Jonathan Levin has an excellent blog post titled How to make MySQL cool again. It is almost word for word something I've wanted to write for a long time. Now I don't need to, thanks Jonathan.

Once again Blogger failed to post my comments to his site, so I will make some comments as a new post of my own instead. Jonathan actually lists things that exist already but isn't getting used enough. My list contains also a few things that I don't know if they exist or not.

Hi Jonathan

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Some of you already know since you helped us move, we recently shifted Open Query’s main office to Fifth Avenue, next door to Elizabeth’s. The new place is comfortable, I really like it so far. Anna is also happy with her new admin space and cat Figaro has found an empty spot on a bookshelf to stretch out on!

The lease costs are a bit steep, as is common these days… chances are we’ll just buy our next place.

Follow-Up yes this was an April 1st post. But, everything in the above post is the truth, it’s just phrased to be very open for a bit of mis-interpretation

I find that the real world provides plenty of fun and unbelievable yet true tidbits, so why bother making up nonsense!

A user on a linux user group mailing list asked about this, and I was one of the people replying. Re-posting here as I reckon it’s of wider interest.

> [...] tens of gigs of data in MySQL databases. > Some in memory tables, some MyISAM, a fair bit InnoDB. According to my > understanding, when one doesn’t have several hours to take a DB > offline and do dbbackup, there was/is ibbackup from InnoBase.. but now > that MySQL and InnoBase have both been ‘Oracle Enterprised’, said > product is now restricted to MySQL Enterprise customers.. > > Some quick searching has suggested Percona XtraBackup as a potential > FOSS alternative. > What backup techniques do people employ around these parts for backups > of large mixed MySQL data sets where downtime *must* be minimised? > > Has your backup plan ever been put to the test?

You should put it to the test regularly, not just when it’s needed. …

I got access to our 12-core Intel server, so I was able to do some better benchmarks to test the different group commit thread scheduling methods:

This graph shows queries-per-second as a function of number of parallel connections, for three test runs:

1. Baseline MariaDB, without group commit.
2. MariaDB with group commit, using the simple thread scheduling, where the serial part of the group commit algorithm is done by each thread signalling the next one.
3. MariaDB with group commit and optimised thread scheduling, where the first thread does the serial group commit processing for all transactions at once, in a single thread.

(see the previous post linked above for a more detailed explanation of the two thread scheduling algorithms.)

This test was run on a 12-core server with hyper-threading, memory is …

This is just a friendly reminder that you can nominate your favorite MySQL community member, application and company for the traditional awards. The nominations must be in by the end of this week, after which the panel votes on them:

http://openlife.cc/blogs/2011/march/call-nominations-2011-oreilly-mysql-...

I've seen at least a few people on IRC that were thinking of sending in nominations, now is a good time to do it!

The address is mysql.awards@gmail.com

The best part of the recent MariaDB meeting in Lisbon for me was that I got some good feedback on my group commit work. This has been waiting in the review queue for quite some time now.

One comment I got revolve around an optimisation in the implementation related to how threads are scheduled.

A crucial step in the group commit algorithm is when the transactions being committed have been written into the binary log, and we want to commit them in the storage engine(s) in the same order as they …

Every morning before any of the meetings get started I print out a small one page newsletter which contains (among other things) the program for the day. Rather than keep them private, Colin suggested I post them here. I call the newsletter the “MariaDB Programador de Journal” which (I think) translates to “MariaDB Programmer’s Journal” in Portuguese.

MariaDB Programador de Journal 11 March 2011

MariaDB Programador de Journal 12 March 2011

[Updated, 13 Mar 2011, to add the newsletter for that day.]

At the meeting we’ve also been taking notes and posting them online for what improvements we want to make this year in MariaDB to make …

Here are the slides from my talk at Open Source Days 2011 on Saturday. The talk was about MariaDB and other parts of the MySQL development community outside of MySQL@Oracle.

For me, the most memorable part of the conference was the talk by Noirin Shirley titled Open Source: Saving the World. Noirin described the Open Source Ushahidi project and how it was used during the natural disaster crisis in Indonesia, New Zealand and other places.

Now, there is a long way from implementing group commit in MariaDB to rescuing injured people out of collapsed buildings, and not all use of Free Software is as …