FOSDEM 2013

The Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software.

I attended for the first time over the weekend and was really impressed by the number of people there, the energy and the quality of the content. The event really lives up to it’s name and is very developer-focused.

In the end, I got the opportunity to make 2 presentations. The first is a general introduction to MySQL Cluster….

The second illustrates how you can realise the benefits promised by NoSQL data stores wihtout losing the consistency and flexibility of relational databases…

FOSDEM 13 is now over, I am on my way home and I would like to share some thoughts sparkled by the intense atmosphere that I have lived in these two days in Brussels.

I have to admit, I was tempted to skip FOSDEM this year: the last 3 weeks have been crazily busy and I travelled a lot, leaving my family alone for too long. But now I am glad I made the effort.
For once, I will leave the comments around the MySQL talks to others, I am sure there will be posts on the matter. In this post I want to cover some of the non-MySQL talks and discussions I have attended and heard. Of course the topics that have been discussed are still relevant for MySQL and for the future of the MySQL ecosystem.
First of all, the number of attendees was impressive. The organisers claim there were more than 5,000 open source enthusiasts, in my opinion the number was even higher. Every room was …

This weekend I am supposed to be giving a talk at FOSDEM on Libdrizzle.  Unfortunately my kids and I all fell ill on Thursday (my wife appears to be immune) so I had to cancel my plans (infecting 5000 people didn't seem wise :)

Instead I am writing this blog post about Libdrizzle and my part in it which covers some of what I was going to talk about.

History of LibdrizzleLibdrizzle started out as a from-scratch C connector for Drizzle and MySQL originally created by Eric Day.  It was designed to be high performance and use common standards to make it easy to work on.  In the summer of 2010 it was merged into the main Drizzle tree where development has been focused.  There were several attempts to split it out again but until now none were truly successful.

For a few years Brian …

February is turning out to be a busy month. I’ll be giving a talk about MariaDB at the SkySQL Solutions Day in Hamburg, alongside Sergei Golubchik. This happens February 1 2013.

I’ll also be in Brussels for FOSDEM and presenting at the MySQL & Friends devroom. Here I will talk about MHA and how you can get automated MySQL failover. I’ll also be hanging out at the CentOS booth with Karanbir Singh giving away MariaDB stickers all weekend. If you’re at FOSDEM, don’t forget to sign up for the …

FOSDEM is a free event that offers open source communities a place to meet, 
share ideas and collaborate.
It is renowned for being highly developer-oriented 
and brings together 5000+ geeks from all over the world.

 
This year again, be sure that FOSDEM will be the place to be in February!

Do you have any doubts? Really ? Dude, repeat after me :

1. Free event
2. During a week-end
3. Beer
4. 5000+ open source geeks
5. Beer
6. MySQL and Friends devroom
7. NoSQL devroom
8. No registration needed (open source man!)

Ok, that sounds good?

Well, here are the informations to attend this terrific event :

• How to register? : Are you kidding me?
• When : 2 & 3 February 2013 (Hurry up guys!)
• Where : Brussels (beers!!!)
• Website …

Libdrizzle is getting better and better with every release, and to reflect this we have two announcements to make.

First of all, Libdrizzle 5.1.2 has been released.  This release has several major bug fixes and performance enhancements.  Changes are as follows:

• Non-blocking Windows connections are now more stable
• Improvements to Windows building
• Unix Socket connections are now more stable
• Memory allocation/freeing cleanups (for performance and ease of code)
• Network packet buffer now much more flexible
• Many performance improvements (the bundled drizzle_binlogs tool is now around 10x faster on my i7 laptop)
• Several other minor bug fixes

API chages:

• drizzle_query_str() has been removed, drizzle_query() with a 0 byte length parameter now does the same thing.

As always you can …

Oh yes, 2012 was an incredible year for the MySQL Community!
That’s why I would like to change the rules this year and I would like to offer you a new survey for this [Plus] reader’s choice 2012.

Community users, bloggers and events made the whole community last year, tell us how you used this community?
It will only take 5 minutes of your precious time, votes will be closed Jan. 31.

Vote for what you used! (with your heart, again…)

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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I may not work on many MySQL related things any more but there are some MySQL ecosystem events that I am participating in.

First there is Percona Live London.  This event is on the 3rd and 4th of December at The Millennium Gloucester Conference Centre.  At this event I will be giving a talk on MySQL Compatible Open Source Connectors.  This will cover alternatives to the standard connectors and how to use them, it will be useful if you find the licensing behind the standard connectors prohibiting.  There is also a 40% off discount code you can use when registering, simply enter the promo code "Come2mytalk".

On the 2nd and 3rd of February is FOSDEM.  At …

Frédéric Descamps of Percona.

Percona Toolkit is Maatkit & Aspersa combined. Opensource and the tools are very useful for a DBA.

You need Perl, DBI, DBD::mysql, Term::ReadKey. Most tools are written in Perl, and whatever is in Bash is being re-written in Perl. There is also a tarball or RPM or DEB packages.

Know your environment. The hardware & OS are crucial for you to know. How much memory/CPU do you use? Do you use swap? Is this a physical/virtual machine? Do you have free space? What kind of RAID controller? Volumes? Disk? What about the network interfaces? What IO schedulers are used? Which filesystem is the data stored on? To answer all that, just use pt-summary.

Know your MySQL environment. Version? Build? How many databases? Where is the data …

Sergey Petrunia of the MariaDB project & Monty Program.

MySQL 5.5 GA at the end of 2010. MariaDB 5.3 RC towards the end of 2011 (beta in June 2011).

MySQL 5.5 is merged to Percona Server 5.5 which included semi-sync replication, slave fsync options, atuomatic relay log recovery, RBR slave type conversions (question if this is useful or not), individual log flushing (very useful, but not many using), replication heartbeat, SHOW RELAYLOG EVENTS. About 2/3rds of the audience use MySQL 5.5 in production, with only 2 people using semi-sync replication.

MariaDB 5.3 brings replication features brings group commit in the binary log, which is merged into Percona Server 5.5. Checksums for binlog events which is merged from MySQL 5.6. Sergey goes in-depth about the …