At the MariaDB developer meeting in Istanbul, we didn't yet tackle the logistics of filming and streaming the talks given, so if you weren't there, you have to be content with the blogs and slides published. I did however take the following 3 videos and now that I'm outside of Turkey's Internet firewall, I published them on YouTube. They are not technical at first sight, but if you think about it, they illustrate and summarize perfectly the current status of MySQL/MariaDB community development.

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A very good meeting in Istanbul is drawing to an end. People from Monty Program, Facebook, Galera, Percona, SkySQL, and other parts of the community are meeting with one foot on the European continent and another in Asia to discuss all things MariaDB and MySQL and experience the mystery of the Orient.

At the meeting I had the opportunity to present my plans and visions for the future development of replication in MariaDB. My talk was very well received, and I had a lot of good discussions afterwards with many of the bright people here. Working from home in a virtual company, it means a lot to get this kind of inspiration and encouragement from others on occasion, and I am looking forward to continuing the work after an early flight to Copenhagen tomorrow.

The new interface for transaction coordinator plugins is what particularly interests me at the moment. The …

MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development

MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development, by Sergei Golubchik and Andrew Hutchings, Packt 2010. About 250 pages. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site.)

This book is well worth reading for anyone interested in MySQL internals. I learned a lot from it. It is well-written and understandable. I cannot say that I’m planning to write storage engines or more advanced plugins, but I have a great many ideas how to improve MySQL, and I now understand more clearly which of those are suitable to write as plugins, and of what type of plugin is appropriate. I also think I have a better idea how much work these various ideas might involve.

The book begins …

Hakan and My have done an excellent job organizing our MariaDB developer meeting here in Istanbul. For the farewell dinner, Hakan asked what kind of music we'd like the DJ to play. I realized it is possible to compile a rather nice list of MySQL/MariaDB related music for an evening:

• Obviously: Lilla My's visa (Little Mys song) from the Moomin series. (I love female jazz vocalists anyway!)
• And why not also something from this band called Little My too?

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It turns out that the overhead of dynamic linking on Linux amd64 is 2 CPU cycles per cross-module call. I usually take forever to get to the point in my writing, so I thought I would change this for once :-)

In MySQL, there has been a historical tendency to favour static linking, in part because to avoid the overhead (in execution efficiency) associated with dynamic linking. However, on modern systems there are also very serious drawbacks when using static linking.

The particular issue that inspired this article is that I was working on MWL#74, building a proper shared libmysqld.so library for the MariaDB embedded server. The lack of a proper libmysqld.so in MySQL and MariaDB has caused no end of grief for packaging Amarok for the various Linux distributions. My patch …

There is much excitement this week (understandably) about the formation of the Document Foundation and the LibreOffice fork of Openoffice.org.

Alan Bell sees correlation with the previous fork of Joomla from Mambo and has illustrated the potential impact that forking a project can have with a Google Trends chart, where Mambo is the blue line, and Joomla is the red line:

A similar chart for Debian (blue) and Ubuntu (red) is also instructive:

Or what about Nagios (blue) and Icinga (red):

Hmm. Maybe not the best example. …

While working on a deployment we came across a nasty surprise. In hindsight it was avoidable, but it never crossed our minds it could happen. I'll share the experience so when you face a similar situation, you'll know what to expect.
ScenarioTo deploy the changes, we used a pair of servers configured to replicate with each other (master-master replication). There are many articles that describe how to perform an ALTER TABLE with minimum or no downtime using MySQL replication. The simple explanation is:

1. Set up a passive master of the database you want to modify the schema. 
2. Run the schema updates on the passive master.
3. Let replication to catch up once the schema modifications are done.
4. Promote the passive master as the new active master.

The details to make this work will depend on each individual situation and are too extensive for the purpose of this article. A …

One of many things I really enjoyed working as a Sales Engineer back at MySQL Ab and Sun was that I was paid full time to encourage companies to use open source for their database layer. While Linux has already become the norm for the operating system on servers, and open source alternatives exist for app servers, it wasn't until a few years ago we really started seeing major traction of that in the database layer. And I was happy to be a small part of it!

I'm not really a salesy person. I mean I'm good at evangelizing something I believe in, addressing customer business needs and such. But you couldn't get me to lift a finger just to meet a quota, if I didn't really believe in the product. Which is what good sales guys can do. (Also known as "selling what you have in the truck".)

But thinking back at my time selling MySQL, I felt it was a great privilege to be paid a salary to travel to companies around Europe and spend a day …

I will be in Manila, Philippines from September 13 – 17 2010. If you want to learn more about MariaDB, talk about MySQL, or just talk about open source in general, there are several opportunities for this:

• Y4iT 2010 (event is September 14-17): Thursday, September 16 2010, 1.50pm, the talk I will give is titled: MariaDB: The new M in LAMP. It was a popular attention grabber during OSCON, where we had a MariaDB booth, and this is a completely new talk, so should be fun to give in front of a huge audience.
• MySQL/MariaDB Meetup on September 16 2010, 4-6pm, at Bahay ng Alumni. This is a meetup, and will be informal, so good for Q&A. Manila doesn’t have a regular MySQL Meetup group, and we’re hoping to kick something off here. Much thanks to Rom Feria, who helped putting everyone together to …

MariaDB just released MariaDB 5.1.50. Linux, Solaris and Windows (32-bit) are supported. Go give it a twirl.

Its also worth noting that today when you go install Drupal, and check out the documentation for requirements, you’ll see that MariaDB is now a recommended option.

Via the new news page at Monty Program’s newly designed website, I also found out that MariaDB is now recommended in the documentation for the next release of the Zend Framework. See the …