If you couldn’t attend the MariaDB & MySQL Community Event in April 2014, held at the Hilton Santa Clara, fret not as there are slides and videos uploaded for you to watch at your leisure. There is likely to be at least one more community event later this year, so watch the space.

Currently on the page, you’ll find most of the talks with slides and the videos are professionally done – with slide overlays. The audio could be better on some, but for an event that was pulled together by Monty in less than 3 weeks, it’s not too shabby. You can learn What’s new in MariaDB 10, a little more about the SPIDER storage engine, more about the …

In the MySQL team we are proposing to deprecate the COM_REFRESH packet in favor of specific queries to execute FLUSH commands. To provide a bit of context:

• The MySQL server protocol allows for clients to speak API commands via both a query and binary protocol interface. The set of the API commands can be seen in the MySQL Client/Server Protocol internals documentation, or very simply as they appear in a single switch statement:

  # ./sql/sql_parse.cc:1009 (simplified view)
  
    switch (command) {
  
    case COM_REGISTER_SLAVE:
    {
      /* do stuff */
      break;
    }
    case COM_QUERY:
    {
      /* parse query, do stuff */
      break;
    }
    case COM_REFRESH:
    {
     /* equivalent to running a FLUSH command */
      break;
    }
    case COM_SHUTDOWN:
    {
      kill_mysql();
      break;
    }
  }
  

• The historical advantage of having a binary …

Improving security has been a high priority for MySQL 5.7. To give you an idea of some of the changes to date, I recommend reading Todd Farmer's blog: Redefining --ssl option, Password expiration policy, AES256 encryption.

In MySQL 5.7, we are also proposing to remove the 'old' format for saving passwords. To provide some historical context:

• The old password format is a 16-byte hash and considered to be cryptographically weak. Code appears online (I won't link to it) which allows the hash to be brute-forced in …

The PHP UnConference is taking place on May 17-18, 2014 on the Island of Majorka. MySQL team is going to be presented by Ulf Wendel at this event. As usual for all UnConferences there is no sessions/talks schedule announced prior the conference, attendees might vote for the most interesting topics at the event. So, do not miss to come to PHP UnConference at lovely Island of Majorka!! (in the case you still do not know whether come or not, maybe the price of tickets, weather forecast and/or flight ticket from several locations might convince you...). 

The Solutions Linux & OpenSource …

The German Unix User Group (GUUG) will hold their annual conference "Frühjahrsfachgespräch" on September 23-26 this year (I know, not really "Frühjahr" anymore, but this is how it is).

The Call for Presentations is still open until May 31st. Talks can be proposed in German and English, and there are slots for longer tutorials as well.

The range of possible topics is broad, so if you think you have anything interesting to share with a very passionate and technical audience of sysadmins and developers, here are some suggestions:

• Operating Systems/Applications: architectures, privilege concepts, new developments, administration, mobile systems
• Relevant new OS Kernel features: new developments in Linux-, BSD- or other Spen …

mysql_install_db is the program that is responsible for bootstrapping a fresh copy of MySQL and making sure all of the system tables are setup correctly. This program is usually invoked by other programs as part of installation, but in the case of .tar.gz downloads will need to be executed manually.

As part of our ongoing efforts to refactor and improve MySQL, we are looking at converting mysql_install_db from its current Perl script to a program written in C++. The aim of this change is to reduce external dependencies (Perl + a set of modules) and improve our cross-platform experience.

We plan for this transition to be mostly function neutral, but are open to feature requests for additional improvements as well.

Have you worked in packaging MySQL?
Do you have any suggestions on how mysql_install_db can be improved?
Please leave a comment, or get in …

This month another MySQL User Group meeting is scheduled, this time in Seoul, Korea on May 20, 2014 @ 6:30pm. Please mark your calendar for this day if you are local... It's a great opportunity to hear news about delivering MySQL 5.7.4 as well as we saved some time for a MySQL User Group discussion. Please see details below:

Name: MySQL User Group Meeting

Date: May 20th, 2014

Time: 6:30pm

Place: 15fl. ASEM Tower, (Oracle Korea office), Samsung-dong, Seoul, Korea

For more details see the MySQL Korea User Group Facebook page

MySQL, the original brand, the one developed by the MySQL team at Oracle, is steadily evolving. You can feel it if you try every new release that comes out of the milestone release cycle. Or even if you don’t try all of them, just testing a release once in a while gives you something to think about.

The engineers at Oracle are trying hard to improve the defaults. If you are the out-of-the-box type, and just install the new version on top of the previous one, leaving the same setup in place, you may be up for a for a few surprises. It’s the marketing, see? They tell you that just by replacing your old MySQL (5.1 or 5.5) with MySQL 5.6 you get 30% to 70% performance improvement. Which happens to be true, not only because the server is better, but also because they have changed the defaults. However, this change in defaults may come with some serious consequences for the ones who …

We are looking for community feedback on how improve the Signal-to-Noise ratio of PlanetMySQL, and reduce the amount of irrelevant and off-topic posts.

To give you a sense of where we are at today, we currently approve most [all?] blogs for aggregation, provided they have some existing technical content. We then apply a naive regular expression to make sure that all posts are on topic (MySQL).

The sorts of ideas we are looking for are:

• What content are you interested in seeing more or less of?
• What posts do you deem as acceptable or unacceptable?
• Do we need to change the balance between technical, marketing, event, or business-related posts?
• Are there any tools or features we could introduce to better serve readers and authors?

If you have any suggestions - please send them my way!

Want to know more about recent MySQL ads? If so, and if you are closed to Paris, join us for the MySQL Tech Day scheduled for May 22nd, 2014. 

You will have an opportunity to hear the latest MySQL news, InnoDB new features and MySQL Performance Schema given by the key MySQL experts. Also this event is constructed as the interactive one, so you will have a chance to discuss and ask questions at this free event. Please review the detailed agenda below and here (in French).

Event Details:

Date: May 22, 2014

Time: 10:00 - 17:30 

Place: Oracle France, 15 Boulevard Charles de Gaulle, 92715 Colombes Cedex, Paris, France

Entrance fee: Free of charge

Registration: Please register …