This is the way to learn: I've gained more in one day with Open Query than in all my time at university!
February 2010 - MySQL and MariaDB News
Hi, and welcome to the February 2010 issue of the Open Query Newsletter.
In this issue:
- short news
- remote services extended with system administration
- MariaDB 5.1, where MySQL production innovation is happening!
- upcoming training schedule - upcoming events
- tip: OQGRAPH Engine for hierarchies and social networks
Short News
One of our Australian trainers, Ray Cauchi, found himself affected by a paralysis tick (the little bloodsucking critters that drop from trees) late last year, severely affecting his ability to function. Fortunately he's been recovering and doing much better now. We wish him a continued and hopefully full recovery!
Oracle (finally) completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and that means that the MySQL trademark and other intellectual property is now owned by Oracle. A quirky situation, for sure, and we at Open Query are well aware that many of our clients are apprehensive (if not downright hostile) to having any dealings with Oracle. Since MySQL is GPL licensed, its case is rather unique, the existing codebase cannot just disappear. For more details on where we focus our attention, see the section in this newsletter about MariaDB 5.1. If you have any concerns about availability, support, bugfixes, please contact us http://openquery.com/contact
Remote Services Extended with System Administration
As part of our proactive support subscriptions where we do remote work on your MySQL servers, we were already involved in some system administration tasks such as package management/updates and firewall setup. Many of our clients don't have a dedicated sysadmin, pretty much the same as they don't have a DBA. So we've found we fill a real need there!
Now that we have sufficient sysadmin expertise on board, we're happy to take on sysadmin tasks as part of your MySQL infra, provided it has something to do with the MySQL servers. So, we'd generally focus on your database servers, application servers, storage, and the connectivity between them. Of course, monitoring tools are also part of this.
Sysadmin work is now simply another part of what we can do, under the existing arrangements. You subscribe for our time (and expertise, of course), and we use this time to help you, every month. See http://openquery.com/proactive for details and pricing. The base rate is only 125/hr, with discounts for more hours and longer commitments.
MariaDB, where MySQL production innovation is happening!
MariaDB is a branch of MySQL 5.1, maintained by Monty Widenius, Monty Program Ab, and the community. Many of the highly experienced core developers (including most of the optimiser experts: Igor, Timour, Sergey) work at Monty Program, and they have been very busy completing bugfixes and tasks that had often been lingering for years.
Yes it's a fork (in case you're wondering about the semantics), but right now it still feeds in changes from Sun/MySQL (now Oracle) upstream. With the available expertise, that feed can be cut if necessary. While Sun/MySQL has put out some innovative features in MySQL 5.4 and 5.5, they are like "feature previews" and won't go to production. MariaDB focuses on getting useful features to production level, so you can actually use them: where necessary, features are (back)ported.
You may already be familiar with the OurDelta builds of MySQL 5.0, including many useful performance and administration patches from Google, Percona and others. For 5.1, OurDelta has chosen to use MariaDB as its baseline, already including the InnoDB plugin with performance enhancements (XtraDB), the PBXT storage engine, and many of the other familiar 5.0 patches such as the ones for the slow query log.
While we hope that Oracle will continue to put development effort into MySQL, we feel it unwise to rely solely on that source. But even without that consideration, MariaDB has all the right credentials, and has been delivering the fast bugfixing and adoption of community contributions we need. MariaDB 5.1.42 is now rated for production use, with OurDelta packages available shortly.
We currently have Developer, DBA and High Availability course days scheduled in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne. MySQL 5.1, MariaDB and related enhancements are of course covered. You can register for Open Query course days/modules individually, to suit your time, budget and current needs. Your trainers for these days are Sean and Arjen.
If you sign up early for all adjacent DBA/HA days in a city, you will receive a copy of Arjen's "High Performance MySQL" book. Secure your seat today!
- Wed 10 Mar: MySQL Optimisation by Design (AUD 475)
- Tue 11 Mar: MySQL Locking, Transactions & Storage Engine Optimisation (AUD 475)
- Fri 12 Mar: MySQL Query Performance Analysis and Tuning (AUD 575)
- Wed 24 Mar: MySQL Optimisation by Design (AUD 475)
- Tue 25 Mar: MySQL Locking, Transactions & Storage Engine Optimisation (AUD 475)
- Fri 26 Mar: MySQL Query Performance Analysis and Tuning (AUD 575)
- Wed 10 Apr: MySQL Installation, Security and User Management (AUD 475)
- Thu 11 Apr - Fri 12 Apr MySQL Backup and Recovery + Replication Workshop (AUD 975)
- Thu 29 Apr: MySQL High Availability - Strategy and Tools (AUD 575)
- Fri 30 Apr: MySQL Cluster Workshop (AUD 575)
For bookings and questions, contact us today! All prices excluding GST.
Upcoming Events
- Santa Clara, CA USA, 12-15 Apr 2010: O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010. The yearly MySQL conference, run by O'Reilly, program chair Colin Charles. Arjen will give a tuturial on dual master setups and a session about our OQGRAPH engine.
- San Francisco. CA USA, 19-21 Apr 2010: DrupalCon SF. the big annual Drupal conference. Arjen has submitted several talks. For drupalcon, submissions are selected through a vote by the registered attendees!
Tip: OQGRAPH Engine for Hierarchies and Social Networks
You've made it this far, and hopefully found items of interest; but we reckon something extra is always nice, so we put a tip at the end of every newsletter.
Everybody knows that dealing with hierarchies in a relational database is awkward, and depending on your needs it gets ugly, or downright impossible to do quickly in SQL (lots of queries needed, etc).
Or so it was. But what if...
- you could do such operations with simple single queries?
- you could have not only simple trees but also complex ones (multiple parents) ?
- you could have complex graphs for friend-of-a-friend or other structures?
The OQGRAPH Engine (designed by Arjen from Open Query) does all that, without breaking a sweat. Externally it looks like a table and a storage engine, but internally it's a computational engine, in this case specialised for graph operations. It's GPLv2+ licensed, available for MySQL 5.0 and 5.1, MariaDB 5.1 and Drizzle.
There's already a Drupal module friendlist_graph which extends the existing friendlist module, transposing the friendlist data using an OQGRAPH table, allowing you to query it in new and interesting ways. By adding some extra Drupal Views, it allows you to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with your Drupal users or find out how two arbitrary users are connected. It can find a path of arbitrary length near-instantly.
Now think beyond: retrieve/share connections using OpenSocial, FOAF, Twitter/Identi.ca, logins with OpenID, and you “instantly” get a very functional social networking enabled site that does not rely on centralised critical mass!
See the OQGRAPH homepage for information, documentation and examples. Because OQGRAPH is not a general purpose storage engine, its path to "production ready" has been much shorter. It's a real enabler, and super-easy to use.
- OurDelta build of MySQL 5.0.86-d10 (Sail edition) already includes OQGRAPH.
- OQGRAPH will also shortly be merged into the MariaDB core source tree for inclusion into every build. Most likely, it'll be incorporated from version 5.1.43.
Until next time!
Feedback welcome through http://openquery.com/contact
You can also access this issue online: http://openquery.com/newsletter/2010-02
-- the OQ team
We aim to keep our newsletter in plain text, apart from links. If you're reading the Open Query Newsletter online or received it via someone else, you can subscribe for your own copy through http://openquery.com/user/register
- Newsletter:
