5 years of MySQL

People often write a blog post when they reach some nice anniversary since they joined MySQL community. Well, for those old enough it usually means when they joined MySQL AB as employee. For me this was January 2008. Because I didn't remember the month correctly, I haven't blogged anything then, but decided to save it for a better opportunity - now.

TL;DR Starting this week I will be working for 10gen, selling MongoDB to the Nordics. This blog post is really long - even then it doesn't contain the most interesting stories, I'm not sure if they can ever be published. Sorry for the length, but remember you don't need to read all at once. This is my last MySQL post so save some of it for cold winter days!

2008 - Sun acquisition

Slides from my Percona Live talk evaluating the new spatial features in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 are now online. This is new material I have never presented before. It is based on work I have done in my job at Nokia HERE.com location services. So even if at this conference it draws less attention than my HA talks, it is actually what I'm most proud of to present.

TL;DR summary is that PostgreSQL has lots of features but MySQL has much better ease of use and performance. (I copy paste this standard sentence into any PostgreSQL vs MySQL evaluation I do :-) The MongoDB info is basically outdated, as the new 2.4 release introduces completely new implementation based on GeoJSON, new indexing, neither of which I tested.

Good morning Percona Live visitors! Attached to this post you can find a spreadsheet (both LibreOffice or Excel, as you prefer) that you can use towards the end of my tutorial. I've also attached the slides so you can download a copy of them.

This is the second and final part of my notes from the MySQL conference. In this part I'll focus on the technical substance of talks I saw, and didn't see.

More than ever before I was a contributor rather than attendee at this conference. Looking back, this resulted in seeing less talks than I would have wanted to, since I was speaking or preparing to speak myself. Sometimes it was worse than speaking, for instance I spent half a day picking up pewter goblets from an egnravings shop... (congratulations to all the winners again :-) Luckily, I can make up for some of that by going back and browse their slides. This is especially important whenever 2 good talks are scheduled in the same slot, or in the same slot when I was to speak. So I have categorized topics here along various axes, but also along the "things I did see" versus "things I missed" axis.

My own talks

Tutorial: Evaluating MySQL High Availability alternatives
Using and Benchmarking Galera in Different Architectures

I have finally recovered from my trip to Santa Clara enough that I can scribble down some notes from this year's MySQL Conference. Writing a travel report is part of the deal where my employer covers the travel expense, so even if many people have written about the conference, I need to do it too. And judging from the many posts for instance from Pythian's direction, Nokia is perhaps not the only company with such a policy?

Baron's keynote

There has usually always been something that can be called a "soft keynote". Pirate Party founder Rick Falckvinge speaking at a database conference is a memorable example (I still keep in touch with him, having met him at the Hyatt Santa Clara). This year there was one less day, and therefore less keynotes. The soft keynote was therefore taken care of by Baron using some time out of Peter's opening keynote. Baron's talk was an ode to the conference itself, underscoring the meaning of the conference beyond just learning about technology. Sharing his own journey from a numb ASP.NET coder ("a good day at the office was when I changed a table based layout to pure CSS ...but nobody else seemed to care.") to his role today, he challenged people to network, make new friends and new revolutionary ideas. To me, it was a great opening keynote (and quite obviously would have made less sense on the last day of the conference). The talk, including Peter's part, is available on Percona.TV.

Today I'm coming out of the closet. Since I'm a professional database expert I try to be like the mainstream and use the commercial MySQL forks (including MySQL itself). But I think those close to me have already known for some time that I like community based open source projects. I cannot deny it any longer, so let me just say it: I'm a Drizzle contributor and I'm very much engaged!

I've been eyeing the Drizzle project since it started in 2008. Already then there were dozens of MySQL hackers for which this project was a refuge they instantly flocked to. Finally a real open source project based on MySQL code that they could contribute to, and they did. It was like a breath of fresh air in a culture that previously had only accepted one kind of relationships: that between an employer and an employee. Drizzle was more liberal. It accepted also forms of engagement already common in most other open source projects that are based on relationships between 2 or more consenting contributors.

But in 2008 I wasn't yet ready to engage with Drizzle. Like I said, I worked in a role where I would go to database users and help them use MySQL in demanding production settings. So as much as I admired Drizzle already back then, I needed something that could give me good releases, and support me when needed.

Good news to all of you who are going or were thinking of going to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. Yesterday two great addon events were announced, both happening on Friday April 13th, right after the main conference:

Drizzle Day 2012

In my previous post I explained why I believe the production of RPM and DEB packages should be more integrated with the rest of your development process. Now it's time to look into how you can put the RPM build scripts inside your main source code repository, and in particular how I did that to produce RPM packages for Drizzle.

Last weekend I released rpm files for the latest Drizzle Fremont beta (announcement). As part of that work I've also integrated the spec file and other files used by the rpmbuild into the main Drizzle bzr repository (but not yet merged into trunk). In this post I want to explain why I think this is a good thing, and in a follow up post I'll go into what I needed to do to make it work.

(And speaking of stuff you can download, phpMyAdmin 3.5.0-alpha1 now supports Drizzle!)

Hi again

It's time to announce the next Helsinki MySQL User Group which is on February 8 at 18:00. Venue is Solinor's meeting and sauna facilities in North Haaga: https://www.meetup.com/The-Helsinki-MySQL-User-Group/events/42163422/

By popular request, Monty will be sharing news about MariaDB, after which there is the usual food, beverages, sauna and socializing.

The organizers would really appreciate it if you could RSVP at the meetup request above. Last time the place was already packed and now with this kind of superstar speaker the hosts want to make sure they book an appropriate room and enough food. (Seems there's already 20+ going!)

See you there!