On the road again - FOSSAsia

It has been a few busy months until now. I have moved from Italy to Thailand, and the move has been my first priority, keeping me from attending FOSDEM and interacting with social media. Now I start catching my breath, and looking around for new events to attend. But before I get into this, let’s make a few things clear:

• I am still working for Continuent. Actually, it’s because of my company flexibility that I could move to a different country (a different continent, 6 time zones away) without much trouble. Thanks, Continuent! (BTW: Continuent is hiring! )
• I am still involved with MySQL activities, events, and community matters. I just happen to be in a different time zone, where direct talk with people in Europe and …

The MySQL February Newsletter is available! Find out the latest news on MySQL products and MySQL Connect 2014, and read the technical tips written by MySQL experts at Oracle and in the community. Below are the highlights in this edition:

• Start Preparing for MySQL Connect 2014 Call for Papers
• New GA Release: MySQL for Visual Studio
• Blog: State of the UNION
• Blog: New MySQL Web Installer -- Have You Tried It Yet?
• Blog: MySQL Workbench: Frequent Crashes on Mac OS X? This Might Be The Fix
• Event: MySQL Seminars Are Coming to a City Near You

You can read it online or subscribe to it to receive the latest updates right in your inbox. Watch this …

Thank you to the MySQL Community, on behalf of the MySQL team @ Oracle. Your bug reports, testcases and patches have helped create a better MySQL 5.6.16.

In particular:

• Thanks to Honza Horak for suggesting we make tmpdir configurable at build-time, and for providing a patch. Bug #68338.
• Thanks to Hartmut Holzgraefe for reporting a memory leak when using the InnoDB memcached API and replication. Bug #70757.
• Thanks to Justin Swanhart for reporting that InnoDB reported an incorrect operating system error code when it failed to initialize. Bug #70867.
• Thanks to Yoshinori Matsunobu who reported …

At FOSDEM 2014 ProxySQL and MaxScale were both presented. Both are proxy that can help build sophisticated MariaDB/MySQL architectures. But currently what is the most used proxy with MySQL? It is HAproxy. HAproxy is a level 4 proxy that has no knowledge of the MySQL protocol. Being low level makes it very fast but it [...]

Last Wednesday, I spoke at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup on the topic of changes coming in MySQL 5.7 (and later).  We actually went through two different slide decks; the first on features being considered for deprecation in MySQL 5.7 (or later), and the second set providing a brief overview of the new features and benefits already introduced in MySQL 5.7 via the development milestone releases (DMRs) published to date.  A big thanks to the entire SF Meetup group, and in particular the organizers (Erin, Mike and Darren), for having me.  The event was streamed and recorded, and you can view the full presentation on YouTube.  The slide deck can be found here.

The discussion around proposed deprecation was good, and this blog serves to document my own notes about what …

We are considering enabling the SQL mode ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY by default in MySQL 5.7. Here is a quick example to demonstrate how this change will impact you:

Sample Data:

CREATE TABLE invoice_line_items (id INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY auto_increment, 
invoice_id INT NOT NULL,
description varchar(100)
);

INSERT INTO invoice_line_items VALUES 
 (NULL, 1, 'New socks'),
 (NULL, 1, 'A hat'),
 (NULL, 2, 'Shoes'),
 (NULL, 2, 'T shirt'),
 (NULL, 3, 'Tie');

Default behaviour in MySQL 5.6 and below:

mysql> SELECT id, invoice_id, description 
FROM invoice_line_items GROUP BY invoice_id;
+----+------------+-------------+
| id | invoice_id | description |
+----+------------+-------------+
|  1 |          1 | New socks   |
|  3 |          2 | Shoes       |
|  5 |          3 | Tie         |
+----+------------+-------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Proposed default behaviour in MySQL 5.7:

mysql> SELECT id, …

The MySQL team has been busy fixing bugs and sorting through older bugs. To give you a couple of recent stats:

• Norvald blogged about 14 bugs fixed at the request of Linux Distributions.
• Tomas Ulin’s keynote at Percona Live mentioned 1991 Bugs Fixed in 5.6, with 3763 Bugs Fixed in Total Since MySQL 5.5 GA

As part of our spring cleaning efforts, we have also decided to retire the bug status to be fixed later. That is to say that:

• Some bugs that were marked as to be fixed later have actually been fixed. Keeping a status of items that won’t be fixed for now has proven difficult to diligently maintain as accurate.
• We want to prevent a half-way state …

MySQL has sometimes faced criticism for being too relaxed at allowing invalid values, or inserting but truncating values that are out of range. For example:

mysql> CREATE TABLE unsigned_int (a int unsigned);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)

mysql> INSERT INTO unsigned_int (a) VALUES (-1);
Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.01 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM unsigned_int;
+------+
| a    |
+------+
|    0 |
+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

In MySQL 5.0 two strict sql_mode options were introduced to be able to change this behaviour:

• STRICT_ALL_TABLES – Behave more like the SQL standard and produce errors when data is out of range.
• STRICT_TRANS_TABLES – Behave more like the SQL standard and produce errors when data is out of range, but only on transactional storage …

In the MySQL team @ Oracle, we’ve been discussing changing the default values for MySQL replication so that they are safer to use.

Specifically:

We're very pleased to announce that MySQL Connect will next year take place from Monday September 29 to Thursday October 2, 2014, in San Francisco. And there will be a welcome reception on Sunday September 28 evening.

During the past 2 years we’ve run MySQL Connect during the weekend prior to Oracle OpenWorld, and we repeatedly got feedback that avoiding the weekend would be better. Well, this is now done! MySQL Connect will be fully aligned with Oracle OpenWorld. This will also enable us to have more room to schedule sessions across the 4 days and to be better integrated within Oracle OpenWorld overall, which was also part of the feedback we’ve got.

We will provide more details down the road but wanted to make sure you could save the dates and make your plans accordingly.

The Call for Papers will likely open in March, so start thinking about your topics now in order to submit them swiftly when it …