Summary:Arjen would give me an earful if I got this wrong or poorly worded."OurDelta produces enhanced builds for MySQL, with OurDelta and third-party patches, for common production platforms" from http://ourdelta.org/aboutOver the next series of articles I am going to put the many additions to the MySQL 5.0 baseline through their paces on Amazon EC2.Using a base CentOS 4.4 I had lying around on

Summary: Arjen would give me an earful if I got this wrong or poorly worded. “OurDelta produces enhanced builds for MySQL, with OurDelta and third-party patches, for common production platforms” from http://ourdelta.org/about Over the next series of articles I am … Continue reading →

Arjen & Monty @ LCA2009 in Hobart

I did a couple of sessions on OurDelta at the Linux.conf.au database miniconf: an overview of the project, a short delve into the features, and a “hacking the mysql server for dummies” which was found of particular interest. It’s a pity that session didn’t get accepted into the MySQL conference, it even had MySQL-uberguru Antony Curtis as co-speaker.

In the hacking talk in Hobart, I showed people the basic infrastructure of the source tree, then going through one particular patch and which changes it makes inside the server (and why). This is an excellent way to learn, as patches have a neat limited scope yet they do something significant. The good news is that the sessions were recorded, so when the LCA team finishes transcoding the hundreds of sessions we might be able to put ours up here!

Original author and MySQL …

While hard at work, it’s important to be visible so people don’t wonder if there’s anything happening… the open source development model is extremely good for this, things are just public all the time. Some may find this a source of stress or potential embarassment, but I think it’s great and overall makes for better quality code, products, and a nicer work environment.

To see what’s going on with OurDelta right now, we need to take a peek at https://code.launchpad.net/percona-patches where the Percona developers have been busy putting in lots of changes in both the 5.0.67 tree  (mainly little improvements and fixes to existing patches) as well as working on the 5.1 ports of the 5.0 patches. Launchpad lets you subscribe to a particular branch, so you get notified when there’s a new commit, and see the changeset comment. That’s a very handy way to keep up to date.

For OurDelta, the first 5.1 release …

In a nutshell, there is some code for doing delayed replication from inside the server, as an optional parameter to the CHANGE MASTER TO syntax. Maatkit has a script for doing this functionally externally, but an internal solution might be preferred.

If you have an urgent interest in this feature, in either MySQL 5.0 or MySQL 5.1, please contact me to discuss.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ourdelta/+bug/288898 for more details and current code status (link to relevant OurDelta branch that has the work-in-progress patches).

OpenSQL Camp 2008 has come and gone, and hooray again for Baron who came up with the idea and made most of it happen (but let’s not forget Sheeri!)  Events such as these are always educational, but the most interesting stuff happens outside of the organised sessions (and this being an un-conf, they weren’t that strictly planned anyway

For me (Arjen) a major chunk of the exercise was acquiring jetlag there and back with no days to spare either side, but I feel it was well worth it. I spent most of the time listening and talking with people rather than coding. It was a great opportunity to catch up with Monty, the Percona crew (Baron, Peter, Vadim, Tom, and more - there’s so many of them now!), Brian, Stewart, Jay, Pat, Eric and other Drizzlers, Sheeri, active OurDelta people like Nick and Rob, ex-Brisbanite Ronald, and of course Jim who …

Arjen & gang are looking for skilled and enthusiastic colleagues!
Essentials

• guru level practical skills in MySQL schema/query design, server administration and tuning;
  
• expertise with common dev and deployment infrastructure (mainly Linux but also other *nix and Windows);
  
• freedom to travel without restriction;
  
• self-motivated, ability to work independently (from anywhere - good Internet access required);
  
• excellent written/verbal English, comfortable public speaker.

Being a small, company, the range of possible work tasks can be quite diverse, although you are not required to be able to do everything. That said, your application will be more highly regarded if you exhibit a broad range of skills and interests, both directly technical and otherwise.
Desirable abilities

• shell and Perl scripting;
  
…

If you start with the d6 build, you probably have ourdelta.org in your repo files rather than mirror.ourdelta.org. Since we moved to using download mirrors, you need to update your repo config files. There are redirects in place for download users, but yum/apt-get generally don’t like redirects. For details on what your config should now look like, just take a peek at the information for each distro we currently support:

• RHEL/CentOS (4 & 5)
• Debian (4.0 Etch)
• Ubuntu (8.04 LTS Hardy, 8.10 Intrepid)

Once you’ve fixed this up, updates should be painless in the future (i.e., updating to the current d7 …

This week saw the release of OurDelta patchset d7 build of MySQL 5.0.67, basically a cleaned-up update of the earlier (and first) OurDelta d6 build. The number of downloads/fetches within the first few hours surpassed the total number from the previous weeks.

Downloads and yum/apt-get repository fetches now always go via one of our mirrors, as obviously the main server can’t possibly handle all that attention! By default you just get sent to “somewhere on the planet”, although you can tweak your repo setup to only use specific mirrors. If you want to become a mirror for OurDelta, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to add you in; the more the merrier!

Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid is now also supported. We welcome input on which additional platforms are desirable.

There was a  …

James Purser of Open Source on the Air has done a podcast interview with Arjen Lentz about OurDelta, describing it as “a new distro for MySQL”.