A year ago I posted a blog on The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating. (Also Giuseppe wrote about the topic at that time, and Peter Zaitsev covers it in his conference keynotes.) So I've been wondering if it would be good to write an update on the topic now, and in that case what to write.

There's now 2 weeks left of the Call for Papers for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (Santa Clara, CA). This weekend I've been finalizing my abstracts for submission and I trust many of you are doing the same. (If nothing else, do it for the free entrance! Or because you're passionate about MySQL, yeah, that's what I meant...)

This is the main annual MySQL event, so I thought it is worth the bandwidth to use these two weeks for some discussion and brainstorming. We are the MySQL community, it's up to us to make this a great conference now! This year I'm on the program committee, so I'm looking forward to reviewing many, many great proposals. At the same time, I'm interested to hear what you, dear readers - and hopefully future conference visitors - are interested in seeing at the conference? I'll share my ideas here and you can share yours in the comments or if you prefer you can email me at henrik.ingo [at] avoinelama.fi.

Here are the slides to my second talk at last week's Percona Live event in London:

Suomeksi: MySQL käyttäjätapaaminen Helsingissä 1. marraskuuta. Klikkaa allaolevaa linkkiä ilmoittautuaksesi, siellä saat myös lisätietoa suomeksi.

Finally it's here! So many of you have always asked about it. Markus and other Elisa guys. Osma and Ilkka at Habbo Hotel. And others... MySQL was born in Helsinki, InnoDB was born in Helsinki, a lesser known database / also MySQL engine called Solid was born in Helsinki, and 2 great replication companies, Continuent with multiple generations of clustering for MySQL, and Codership with Galera, are Helsinki companies. And amidst this embarrassment of riches, what did we not have?

A MySQL User Group.

Update: I won't be in Moscow after all. I was denied visa on grounds that my passport is beginning to fall apart and there wasn't time to get new passport, invitation and visa. Maybe next year - I was excited to go.

October brings 2 very interesting conferences. I will be speaking first on Oct 3rd at HighLoad++ in Moscow and a few weeks later on Oct Oct 25 at Percona Live in London. I will give a talk called Choosing a MySQL Replication / High Availability Solution which is based on my thinking developed in my recent blog post The ultimate MySQL high availability solution and many benchmarks and functional tests I've done while evaluating these technologies.

At Percona Live I will also give a second talk Fixed in Drizzle: No more GOTCHA's. It looked like none of the Drizzle core team would be able to attend the conference and as I was going to be there I volunteered to cover a Drizzle topic at the same time. This is a talk Stewart Smith has given a few times at earlier conferences which I liked and proposed to Percona. As it turns out, also Stewart will be in London after all, so there will be 2 Drizzle talks, I will still give the one I'm committed to.

Just wanted to record for the history books that:


drizzle> select js_eval('var d = new Date(); "Drizzle started running JavaScript at: " + d;')\g
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| js_eval('var d = new Date(); "Drizzle started running JavaScript at: " + d;') |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Drizzle started running JavaScript at: Mon Aug 29 2011 00:23:31 GMT+0300 (EEST) |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.001792 sec)


I will push this onto launchpad tomorrow, after a good nights sleep and final code cleanups.

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 slide.

A week ago Baron wrote a blog post which can only be described as the final nail in the coffin for MMM. At MySQL AB we never used or recommended MMM as a High Availability solution. I never really asked about details about that, but surely one reason was that it is based on using the MySQL replication. At MySQL/Sun we recommended against asynchronous replication as a HA solution so that was the end of it as far as MMM was concerned. Instead we recommended DRBD, shared disk or MySQL Cluster based solutions. Of course, to replicate across continents (geographical redundancy) you will mostly just use asynchronous replication, also MySQL Cluster used the standard MySQL replication for that purpose.

In March I posted a series of blog posts on my paternity leave MepSQL project, which I called MepSQL. There was still one piece created in the MepSQL buildsystem that I didn't publish or blog about. Since it is generally useful, I wanted to generalize and polish it and publish it separately. I finally had that done last week, when I also found that somebody else, namely alestic.com already published a similar solution 2 years ago. So yesterday I ported my BuildBot setup to use that system instead and am happy to publish it at the Open DB Camp 2011 in Sardinia.

Ok, so let's go back a little... What is the problem we are solving?

Let's refresh our memory with a picture (and you can also go back and read about it):

To round off my memoirs from the MySQL conference 2011, I'll just write down for the historical record my own activities.

MySQL awards

With the community picking up tasks that used to be handled by MySQL AB, it somehow has fallen on my lap to drive the selection of winners for the annual MySQL awards. This was the second year we did it and we have settled on a format where the winners are chosen by a community panel consisting of 2 previous years winners, plus the conference chair(s). I think having the community nominating and voting the winners have brought forward some truly deserving and sometimes also surprising winners, and it has been a pleasure to be involved in this process. I feel privileged to be part of a process channeling so much goodwill and respect from the MySQL community to the winners.

This year's winners were already published here previously.

Xtrabackup Manager BoF

Together with Lachlan we did a BoF on Xtrabackup Manager. There was a good group of people turning up. I didn't write down the name, but someone offered to participate by creating a browser based user interface, which XBM doesn't have yet. Peter Zaitsev stopped by for a word of encouragement even if he was also going to another BoF at the same time.