This continues on from my post yesterday and also contains content from my linux.conf.au 2014 talk (view video here).

Way back in May in the year 2000, a feature was added to MySQL that would keep many people employed for many years – replication. In 3.23.15 you could replicate from one MySQL instance to another. This is commonly cited as the results of two weeks of work by one developer. The idea is simple: create a log of all the SQL queries that modify the database and then replay them on a slave. Remember, this is before there was concurrency and everything was ISAM or MyISAM, so this worked (for certain definitions of worked).

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Configuring the character set for MySQL is confusing. It is so confusing that there are roughly 25 different places to configure a character set. Don’t believe me? Add them up. The real number may be closer to 30. I realize a lot of this is due to the age of MySQL and the extent of it’s character set support. MySQL does support character set configuration in many different places which is usually a good thing.

I often complain about defaults that make no sense like lock_wait_timeout=1 year. In this case there is a default that makes absolutely no sense to me. The manual says that select into outfile is the complement of load data infile. It isn’t completely true. They differ in one key aspect, the default character set!. By default select into outfile now does the right thing by using binary character set and dumping the raw bytes to the file. Load data infile defaults to the value of the character_set_database variable which defaults …

The availability of the node.js binding for MariaDB’s non-blocking client library together with the GIS capabilities of MariaDB inspired me to make an example of using node.js and MariaDB to import so-called GPX tracks to a MariaDB database and then show them on a map. GPX tracks are what are stored by many GPS devices including running watches and smartphones.

My project makes use of MariaDB’s non-blocking client library together with the node.js platform and on top of that uses the GIS functionality found in MariaDB 5.5 and 10.0.

To start with let’s go through the software and components I’m using:

• Node.js – The popular Node.js platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime. An event-driven and …

Last night, after my previous blog post, everyone in attendance at the SkySQL developer meeting in Barcelona gathered for dinner at El Cangrejo Loco, which, if my High School Spanish is working, translates as The Crazy Crab. After the excellent food, the tradition of singing at MySQL/MariaDB developer meetings was preserved.

Today the MariaDB developers in attendance at the SkySQL developer meeting in Barcelona got together to work on plans for MariaDB 10.1. We also paused for a group photo:

Many tasks have been identified for possible inclusion in 10.1. Some have already been marked as such in JIRA. A summary is available for those that are interested. More will be added as the plans for 10.1 firm up, so check back.

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Several MariaDB developers are attending SkySQL’s annual engineering meeting being held this week in Barcelona. While some of the discussions are SkySQL-specific (customers, internal projects, and so on), there are, naturally, lots of MariaDB discussions happening.

Patrik Sallner, CEO of SkySQL, opened the meeting this morning with a short presentation about SkySQL’s goals for 2014. While the plan includes standard business-like things that include growing the company and sales goals, the top two goals for 2014 are:

1. Help make MariaDB into the leading open source database

2. Help increase awareness and adoption of MariaDB

Looking back at 2013, it was an excellent year for MariaDB. It is now the default database in Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mageia, and others and it is included in the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7  preview. During the last …

This week we discuss setting up Percona Replication Manager. Ear Candy is playing with Unicode to make seasonal pictures and At the Movies is about systems performance with lots of MySQL examples.

Events
DB Hangops - every other Wednesay at noon Pacific time

FOSDEM 2014 - Sat February 1 - Sun February 2 in Brussels, Belgium.
Upcoming MySQL events

The call for papers for OSCon 2014 is open until Thursday, January 30th

read more

The MariaDB project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.34. This is a Stable (GA) release. See the Release Notes and Changelog for detailed information on this release and the What is MariaDB 5.5? page in the MariaDB Knowledge Base for general information about the MariaDB 5.5 series.

Download MariaDB 5.5.34

Release Notes Changelog …

Next Wednesday (November 20th, at 10 am PST), Ryan Lowe (Percona: Principle Consultant) and Andrew Aksyonoff (Sphinx: CEO and CTO) will be delivering a webinar on how to configure Sphinx for MySQL. “How to Optimally Configure Sphinx for MySQL” The discussion will center around getting started with, and seamlessly integrating, Sphinx into your MySQL-based applications. [...]

I’ll be in Hong Kong for the upcoming OpenStack Summit Nov 5-8. I’d be thrilled to talk database things with others present, especially around Trove DBaaS (DataBase as a Service) and high availability MySQL for OpenStack deployments.

I was last in Hong Kong in 2010 when I worked for Rackspace. The closest office to me was in Hong Kong so that’s where I did my HR onboarding training. I remember telling friends on the Sunday night before leaving for Hong Kong that I may be able to make dinner later in the week purely depending on if somebody got back to me on if I was going to Hong Kong that week. I was, and I went. I took some photos while there.

Walking from the hotel where we were staying to the Rackspace office could be done pretty much entirely through buildings without going outside. There were bits of art around too, which is just kind of awesome – I’m …

Reposted from Monty Says.

I recently read some comments that we at the MariaDB Foundation have not been very open about what we are doing.

We are very sorry about this. The problem is not that we are secret about what we are doing, the problem is that not many of us working at the MariaDB Foundation are very active bloggers.

I will try to address this concern by starting a monthly blog about the MariaDB development that MariaDB Foundation employees are doing. This together with Simon Phipps’ state of the sea lion blog, which is published here, should hopefully give everyone a better idea of what we are doing.

At the MariaDB Foundation we are now 4 people …