The latest from the MySQL community

Those who’ve been around the MySQL world are probably aware of the much-discussed topics of GPL licensing, dual licensing, and in particular, licensing of the client libraries (also called connectors or drivers) and the FOSS exception to that licensing. This is newly relevant with the announcement of a permissively-licensed MySQL-compatible client library for MariaDB.

The difference is that this time there’s been some question about the provenance and history of the source code. Some people asked me about this. Some of them were aware of a relatively obscure detail: there’ve been permissively licensed MySQL client libraries for years, in the form of libdrizzle, a BSD-licensed library for the Drizzle fork of MySQL.

Here are some of the thoughts that seemed to be going through peoples’ minds:

• This changes everything, …

I was just bitten by failing to catch a MySQL warning. It’s the old familiar tune: I inserted 100 characters into a VARCHAR(50) and it didn’t throw an error*. Of course, then subsequent SELECT statements didn’t find the value I inserted.

What’s different this time is that I was using Go as the client. There is no single official MySQL driver for Go, although there are several good-quality community-maintained ones. I was using one of those through the official Go database interface, which is a simple and lightweight way to interact with relational databases. This interface will generate errors, but I didn’t think about warnings. This is funny, because usually I’m paranoid about capturing warnings from MySQL and treating them as errors.

After I discovered my mistake, I realized that Go’s database interface doesn’t provide a way to observe the warnings …

I spoke last Friday at DevIgnition about what’s coming in the MySQL 5.6 release. My slides are embedded below.

Further Reading:

• Presentation uploaded for Maatkit talk at MySQL Conference
• Videos and slides for MySQL Conference 2010
• Surge 2011 slides, recap
• Slides for my MySQL Conference talks are online
• …

Back when Sun Microsystems was setting, some of the programmers who had been involved with the popular and well-known open source MySQL database started a fork of the project called MariaDB.

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I just realized that I didn’t hear a tremendous amount of feedback about Oracle’s MySQL Connect conference. Were you there? If so, how did you like it?

Further Reading:

• Schedule for MySQL-and-beyond conference is live
• I’m going to the upcoming MySQL Camp
• Why is MySQL more popular than PostgreSQL?
• Like it or not, it is the MySQL Conference and Expo
• …

“Some people even think that “Hadoop” and “Big Data” are synonymous (though this is an over-characterization). Unfortunately, Hadoop was designed based on a paper by Google in 2004 which was focused on use cases involving unstructured data (e.g. extracting words and phrases from Webpages in order to create Google’s Web index). Since it was not [...]

Here is the typical “Big” data architecture, that covers most components involved in the data pipeline. More or less, we have the same architecture in production in number of places[...]

If you’ve ever used non-opensource code, or applications that you don’t have complete control over, then you may have run into situations you need to alter data on a per-row basis but been unable to do so for lack of application SQL access. The solution to this type of problem is to use a MySQL TRIGGER, which allows us to execute arbitrary SQL commands when defined events occur. Why is this useful and how does it work? Well…

For example, I have a freeRADIUS server that uses MySQL as a backend for the user authentication, and one of my server applications (HostBill) provides a freeRADIUS plugin that allows my users to manage their RADIUS accounts; however the default freeRADIUS schema lacks a DATETIME column on the user table. When a user is created (INSERT) or has their password changed (UPDATE) I have no row data that tells me the dates when these operations were issued. Typically this would be a trivial change: issue an ALTER TABLE …

With the Big Data craze that’s sweeping the world of technology right now, I often ask myself whether we’re deficit-spending, so to speak, with our data consumption habits. I’ve seen repeated examples of being unwilling to get rid of data, even though it’s unused and nobody can think of a future use for it. At the same time, much Big Data processing I’ve seen is brute-force and costly: hitting a not-very-valuable nut with a giant, expensive sledgehammer. I think the combination of these two problems represents a giant opportunity, and I’m going to call the solution Smart Data for lack of a better word.

What’s the problem, in 25 words or less? I think it’s that we’re collecting a lot of data simply because we can. Not because we know of any good use for it, but just because it’s there.

What is the real cost of all of this data? I think we all know we’re well behind the curve in making use of it. A huge …

I’ll speak at the Central Virginia Ruby Enthusiasts group on Nov 13th. The topic is adaptive fault detection in MySQL servers. The techniques apply to any system for which you can measure throughput and concurrency, so come on out and learn how you can get rid of threshold-based monitoring!

Further Reading:

• Central Virginia MySQL Meetup has reached cruising altitude
• New Central Virginia MySQL Meetup
• Speaking at the Shenandoah Ruby Users …