Last week Percona announced plans to sponsor the Percona MySQL Conference in Santa Clara in April 2012.  It is meant to replace the O'Reilly conferences of previous years.  The announcement led to some reasonable questions, for example from Giuseppe Maxia.  These and other online posts initiated a thoughtful exchange of views about the pros and cons of Percona's conference announcement by various members of the MySQL community.

Not everyone …

As the dog days of summer set in and temperatures rise, this year’s O’Reilly OSCON conference in Portland, OR offered the open source community a brief respite from the heat. However, if you’re thinking the event lacked sizzle, think again. The energy, the discussions and the opportunities to collaborate, plus the chance to learn from/ interact with customers and potential customers, made OSCON one of the highlights of July.

While I’ve attended previous OSCON conferences while at MySQL AB, this was the first time I’ve attended as the CEO of SkySQL. My new role provided a different perspective, as well as new kinds of opportunities to interact with the open source community. There were plenty of terrific, formal presentations and Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, however, those from MySQL, MariaDB and Drizzle were especially noteworthy and informative. Here were a few high points:

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It's my turn to apologize. Andrew and I apparently really angered people by being upset about something last week, and for that, as he already has, I apologize. I don't like making people angry or upset.

I believe Henrik made an excellent point, which is that for various different reasons, there are those of us who were upset when Oracle bought MySQL and yet felt complelled to not communicate this publically. To be honest, emotions related to a business transaction ARE a little weird, so I'm not sure it's completely odd that people don't know how to appropriate express them. But as Henrik rightly pointed out, the Oracle takeover has been the elephant in the room (sorry Postgres - it's not you) and we've all been spending a good amount of energy NOT talking about …

There's been quite the thread on Google+ (my how technology changes quickly...) over a comment Andrew Hutchings made on an Oracle MySQL Blog Annoucment for their new "Meet The MySQL Experts" Podcast. I should have ignored it - because I honestly could not give two shits one way or the other about Oracle or any podcasts that they may or may not decide to broadcast. But to be straightfoward about it ... the title of the podcast is ludicrous. In case you were wondering, "The" in English is the definite article and implies a singular quality to the thing that it describes... effectively implying that Oracle's MySQL Experts are, in fact, the only MySQL Experts. We all know that's false- Percona and SkySQL are both full of experts as well - likely have more MySQL Experts per-capita than Oracle does, as if a per-capita measure were important. Of course, as Matt …

It’s notoriously hard to measure the usage of open-source software. Software that’s open-source or free can be redistributed far and wide, so the original creators have no idea how many times it’s installed, deployed, or distributed. As a proxy, we often use downloads, but that’s woefully inadequate.

I’ve recently begun trying to figure out how many job openings are mentioning various open-source projects. I think that this might be a better metric because it’s driven by the end result (usage), rather than intermediate processes (downloads, etc). I think that it’s likely that usage and demand for skilled people is somewhat realistically related.

To be more concrete, I’ve been watching RSS feeds from job posting aggregators for several alternative versions of MySQL: Percona Server, MariaDB, and Drizzle. It appears that Percona Server is by far the most in-demand in terms of job skills. (I haven’t seen a job posting …

Today I was chatting with a technical friend, and she mentioned that she has a "todo" of writing a decent node.js driver for MySQL. A bit more chatting back and forth, and http://nodejsdb.org/db-drizzle/ was discovered. It was written to use libdrizzle and drizzled, but since libdrizzle can talk to MySQL, it should work for her needs as well.

I would love to see some work done on how well libmysql+mysqld, libdrizzle+mysqld, and libdrizzle+drizzled handle highly concurrent asynchronous event-oriented workloads such as those generated by all these new node.js applications.

I suspect that all sorts of surprising bugs will be discovered.

Please help us discover those bugs.

In December I covered the topic The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating (which was also a response to Giuseppe Maxia's take on the same topic). Since half a year has now passed, I was wondering if I should follow up with an update. (Drizzle having a GA release would be the major news in such an update.)

But I see that Peter Zaitsev covered this topic in the opening keynote of their Percona Live conference. Since I agree with Peter's view on this topic, I just recommend you watch the talk on Percona.TV. He also uses the same categorizations of the forks, and includes "community patches" as its separate …

One of the long term testing goals for Drizzle is to move all of our test logic directly in-tree.  Currently, we use a system called drizzle-automation to execute a variety of tests for our staging branch.  This is the final set of tests patches must pass before being allowed to merge into Drizzle trunk and includes things like sysbench, dbt2, the randgen, etc.  With the development of dbqp, we can now move this testing logic directly into the tree (and even move some of the testing tools there as well).  Of course, I’ve rambled on about this before, but I personally think it is cool and useful ; )  However enough of the sales pitch, on to the new modes!

sysbench mode

With but a simple incantation of ./dbqp –mode=sysbench [–suite=readonly|readwrite], you too can invoke the mighty sysbench configurations that we use to ensure …

Today was another example of where a correct SQL_MODE saved customer data from being corrupted. By default, MySQL does not enforce data integrity. It allows what is called silent truncations where the result of what you INSERT or UPDATE does not represent truth. NOTE: I see very few customers ever have this correctly configured, those that do have actually listened to my advice.

If you do not read any further, your production MySQL environments should be running with at the bare minimum of SQL_MODE=STRICT_ALL_TABLES however I would also advocate for additional SQL_MODE settings.

For this example, some modified undesirable code attempted to reduce a counter by 1, however because of an UNSIGNED data type and a correctly set SQL_MODE, the application produced an error and data was not corrupted.

This is what should happen with your SQL.

mysql> update stats set loss_count=loss_count - 1 where user_id=42; …

Today marks the release of mydumper 0.2.3.  Mydumper is a multi-threaded high-performance data dumper (and loader) for MySQL and Drizzle written in C. This is a minor bugfix release whilst I work on the upcoming 0.5 version. The end goal here will be that there is always a 'stable' and 'development' version. 0.2 will be the first stable version and will only have bug fixes. 0.5 will be the first 'development' version where the next planned set of new features will hit.

So, the changes since 0.2.2 are:

• 
  
• Drizzle support now fully works again
  
• Fixes so mydumper compiles in FreeBSD (thanks to Kirill A. Korinskiy)
  

If you wish to try this version the source can be downloaded …