The latest from the MySQL community

I am not a fan of the MMM tool for managing MySQL replication. This is a topic of vigorous debate among different people, and even within Percona not everyone feels the same way, which is why I’m posting it here instead of on an official Percona blog. There is room for legitimate differences of opinion, and my opinion is just my opinion. Nonetheless, I think it’s important to share, because a lot of people think of MMM as a high availability tool, and that’s not a decision to take lightly. At some point I just have to step off the treadmill and write a blog post to create awareness of what I see as a really bad situation that needs to be stopped.

I like software that is well documented and formally tested. A lot of software is usable even if it isn’t created by perfectionists. But there are two major things in the MySQL world for which I think we can all agree we need strong guarantees of correctness. One is backups. The other is …

GreenSQL invites you to participate in our May Webinars
MAY 18- Securing Databases in Minutes with GreenSQL Express
MAY 24 – Unified Database Security, the Next Generation of Database Security
Press here to sign
http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/579426/4aa0167718/316941501/bdea25b57a/

I am ridiculously far behind on reading blog posts since the MySQL conference. I like to lag somewhat behind, because then when I read the posts I get to see some comments. But I’m much farther behind now than I want to be. This is mostly the fault of the MySQL replication, Performance Schema, NDB Cluster, and InnoDB developers, who just announced a large number of improvements in the upcoming MySQL 5.6 release. How long did it take them to draft all those posts? I hope they keep blogging steadily between releases, too. In the meantime, I’m too far behind. It’s a good problem to have.

Related posts:

1. IE blog is a great experience
2. I moved this blog to pairLite with …

I split my time last week between the IOUG’s Collaborate conference in Orlando, Florida and O’Reilly’s MySQL Conference & Expo in California. The contrast was stark. For me as a MySQLer, Collaborate was a dud. On the other hand, the MySQL conference O’Reilly puts on is superb. It is vital to MySQL as a project and as a community, and it follows that it’s vital to MySQL’s business success. Oracle needs to participate to make it a success in the future.

MySQL at Collaborate had good speakers and content, but no one there is interested in MySQL. MySQL is just from a different world — it is a curiosity at an Oracle conference. Also, as a speaker, sponsor, and attendee, Collaborate was a giant frustration. I can’t recommend it to anyone. (These comments do not reflect on the work that MySQL community members did in recruiting and organizing the MySQL content at the Collaborate conference.) In particular, the experience of …

The slides for my talks at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo are posted.

Related posts:

1. Videos and slides for MySQL Conference 2010
2. Slides for the innotop workshop at MySQL Conference and Expo 2007
3. Recap of CPOSC 2009, plus slides
4. I’ll be speaking at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference 2010
5. …

People keep asking me “what is going to happen to MySQL now that Oracle has screwed MySQL?” I bluntly disagree that any such thing has happened. This blog post is just my personal view and does not reflect my employer’s opinion, but Oracle might have saved MySQL from what I can see. There is no evidence that supports the hysterical doomsday theories. (Witness MySQL 5.5, probably the best MySQL release in history. Not exactly what I’d call “screwing.”)

I believe that a product with such a large, diverse, and important market presence needs a variety of companies involved with it in many different ways. One of the absolutely key things is a company to make money from it. MySQL needs Oracle, because no one else involved is both capable and trying to make MySQL, the product, a large-scale commercial success. It looks like Oracle is doing what I wish Sun could have done.

Now, is Oracle going to be community friendly, …

MyQuery, the ad-hoc query and scripting tool for MySQL, as always running on Windows, supporting servers on any platform, is now available in version 3.4.2. This version has a few minor bug-fixes in the "Break long lines" plugin that cleans up SQL text, and also a few additions to this plugin.
I have not heard of any issues with MyQuery itself since I released 3.4.1, but I will not take the 3.4 version into GA until I have fixed a few more things in the "Break long lines" plugin to turn it into a more full-features SQL beautifier with a lot more features than now.
Until then though, 3.4.2 is what you want, and the Compact Spaces option in the Break Long Lines plugin that is added with this release, should provide useful.

In addition to all this, if you want to meet up and discuss this tool, then I am at your service at the MySQL Usre Conference coming up next week.

Best regards
Anders Karlsson

Working at Percona has taught me to love being disruptive and creating innovative pricing models. In particular, their pay-as-you-go pricing in 15-minute increments, plus the ability to go from first contact to having them logged in and working in a few minutes with just a credit card, has been game-changing. I’ve always wanted to take that to the next level and create a new business, offering MySQL services with a radically simple pricing model.

Well, now I have. I’m offering the option to pay by the minute for MySQL consulting and support. And you don’t even need a credit card or approval from your boss. Best of all, I’ll talk geeky to you while I do it. Just call 1-900-SELECT and in no time at all, I’ll be fixing your servers while saying things like “I love the way you bash me with those shell scripts, you naughty boy! I’m gonna make you ‘friend class Baron’ so you’ll have access to my protected variables!”

I see that “Big Data” has become the new buzzword with a spike of hype around it. Everyone’s jumping on it. Companies are eager to promote their products as “Big Data,” just as they were eager to be associated with Web 2.0, Service-Oriented Architectures, and all the rest. Predictably, there’s basically zero agreement on what it means.

I’ve seen “Big Data” mentioned in the context of 1TB, which I think is rather moderate sized. But worse yet, I’ve seen 100GB labeled Big Data. I’ve even seen 5GB labeled Big Data. No links — I don’t want to draw attention to them.

I don’t know what Big Data is, but the stick-of-gum-sized flash drive in my pocket holds 16GB. It’s pretty Small. I mean, I forget it’s even there — it’s definitely not Big. I don’t know where I’d draw the line, but if it fits in a commodity server’s memory, which 100GB can do easily these days, it’s not Big Data. I don’t even …

This is a test to see if people will vote this down on Planet MySQL. If you’ll vote down some of the posts that have gotten negative marks recently, like Allan Packer saying that he’s still working on Sparc supercluster, or Drizzle going GA, or Percona Server and XtraBackup being available on Solaris, or mk-query-digest filter how-tos, or TokuDB announcing online add of columns, or XtraBackup Manager, or using WordPress on Drizzle, well…

Then you’re probably the kind of person who’ll vote negatively about MySQL saving the lives of baby seals.

Seriously: is it at all possible that the above posts, which got thumbs-down votes, are actually bad news for anyone? I usually don’t look at the Planet, and only read through my RSS feeds, but for some reason today I actually browsed to it, and I was just amazed at how many posts that are nothing but great steps forward for the MySQL community have negative votes! Who …