Category: News and Events

Last week marked my first April-MySQL-Conf since 2009, and now that I’m back home I wanted to reflect on some of my personal highlights.

Photo Credit: @miguel2angel

• Tomas’ keynote on Wednesday morning was awesome. It felt great to be part of the team at Oracle that announced a release 2x faster than MySQL 5.6 and 3x faster than MySQL 5.5. The Parser+Optimizer+InnoDB GIS labs release is also a great sign of things to come.
• Hosting the meet the MySQL team @ Oracle BOF Wednesday night, and answering community questions with my colleagues on our engineering team. It was a pleasant surprise to have Mark Callaghan (Facebook) and Peter Zaitsev (Percona) come and join in as well.
• Attending some of my colleague’s sessions and collating feedback from attendees. In Luis Soares’ what’s new in replication session, we received a couple of great suggestions which we will certainly investigate in more detail.
• Learning how to use new tools. For me, this will be the R programming language (something I had heard of many times before, but never taken a closer look at). It was also great to see MySQL Workbench’s Visual Explain in Bill Karwin’s query optimization talk.
• Seeing our ecosystem expand. The two new technologies that I am most excited about are VividCortex and WebScaleSQL. With WebScaleSQL, it’s a great endorsement to see it based on MySQL 5.6.

I’m back home this week, then on to vacation next week!

As mentioned in my recent MySQL Performance Blog interview, Oracle has a number of vacancies in the MySQL team. By my count, there are 21 current vacancies:

• IRC2431754
  Software Developer 4
  MySQL Server Development (Windows)
• IRC2433642
  Software Developer 4
  MySQL Server Development (Replication)
• IRC2435607
  Internet Sales Representative II
  MySQL Corporate Sales
• IRC2437590
  Software Developer 3
  MySQL Enterprise Tools
• IRC2423566
  Technology Sales Representative III
  MySQL Sales
• IRC2421573
  Technical Analyst 3-Support
  MySQL Support
• IRC2409719
  Sales Consultant
  MySQL Global Business Unit
• IRC2409720
  Sales Consultant
  MySQL Global Business Unit
• IRC2303935
  Sales Consultant
  MySQL Global Business Unit
• IRC2411711
  Telesales Business Development Representative II
  MySQL Sales
• IRC2401744
  Internet Sales Representative II
  MySQL Sales
• IRC2335551
  Business Analyst 4-Ops
  Professional Services
• IRC2376534
  Technical Analyst 3-Support
  MySQL Support
• IRC2378540
  Technical Analyst 3-Support
  MySQL Support
• IRC2378080
  Internet Sales Representative II
  MySQL Sales Americas
• IRC2379740
  Applications Sales Representative III
  MySQL Field Sales
• IRC2359667
  Software Developer 4
  MySQL Server Development Team
• IRC2351560
  Software Developer 3
  MySQL Engineering
• IRC1720632
  Software Developer 4
  MySQL Server General Team
• IRC2139563
  Technical Analyst 3-Support
  MySQL Support
• IRC2131703
  Technical Analyst 3-Support
  MySQL Support

To apply, go to irecruitment.oracle.com and enter the IRC code in the search box.

I’ve just finishing converting my blog from Jekyll to WordPress.
There were a couple of features I was looking for (such as being able to schedule upcoming posts), but the real reason is that I want to be able to use MySQL 5.7 DMR3 against a tool that I interact with almost every day.
Or as this is more informally known, I wanted to eat my own dogfood:
I now have:

• WordPress 3.8.1
• MySQL 5.7 DMR3
• sql_mode=NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES
• All InnoDB Storage Engine
• Disqus comment engine (comment if you think this is cheating)
• “Markdown on Save Improved” plugin.

I apologize for broken images and URLs changing slightly (which will break comments). I plan to fix them as I spot them.
Do you have any other suggestions I should try?

I’m back home in Toronto, after having spent part of last week in Washington DC meeting Oracle’s Federal MySQL users.
I think generally speaking when you look at buzzwords in the startup scene, there is a filter as to what bubbles up into the more conservative enterprise and public sector.
My impression was that there is some interest in big-data, but there is absolutely phenomenal interest in cloud computing. This was a real take away for me, and next time I plan to talk more about the MySQL utilities and MySQL Fabric.
There were two side discussions that affected a number of users that I wanted to follow up with here:

• When upgrading from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6, secure-auth is enabled by default. This incompatible change is unfortunate, but was required to improve MySQL’s password hashing strength. My colleague Todd Farmer has written more about it.
• When upgrading from any MySQL version to the next, it is possible to find a list of all incompatible changes! The documentation team maintains a list of these pages here:

  Upgrading from MySQL 5.1 to 5.5
  Upgrading from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6
  Upgrading from MySQL 5.6 to 5.7

My next event will be FOSDEM in Brussels. If you’ll be in attendance, please sign up for the MySQL and friends community dinner (Oracle is sponsoring)!
- Morgan

My blogging activity will slow down for the next couple of weeks while I prepare for upcoming conferences in January & February.
I will resume with regular posts from January 13th onwards.
Have a safe holiday, and see you in 2014!

Thank you to the Drupal User Group Toronto for hosting me last night. My slides are now available online:

In response to some discussions:

• There is a new ‘tree-like’ EXPLAIN format in MySQL 5.6 called FORMAT=JSON. You can see an example in this post.
• innodb_buffer_pool_size is the in memory setting for how much of your data+indexes can be in RAM, and defaults to 128MB (far too small for most production environments). innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT is the option to disable filesystem caching. Both are mentioned in my what to tune after installation guide.

Thanks again!

I’m now back home in Toronto, recovering from a very busy weekend at MySQL Connect.
This was my first MySQL Connect, and I really enjoyed it. It was great to be able to meet old friends from my MySQL AB days, but also meet some of the new faces that work on MySQL at Oracle. As Edward Screven mentioned in his keynote, the MySQL team is twice the size under Oracle that it was at Sun.
Some additional highlights for me:

• Saturday Morning’s Keynote (now online).
  The video includes both Edward Screven & Tomas Ulin’s keynotes as well as Mark Leith demonstrating the new MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.0 with agentless / cloud friendly architecture and using Performance Schema.
• The announcement of MySQL Fabric.
• Hearing Facebook, Twitter & Mozilla’s positive reinforcement – they love the new features in MySQL 5.6 and plan to upgrade.
• Replication changes in 5.7 – Intra-Schema parallel slaves and labs demo of multi-source. Improved semi-sync performance.
• Speaking to users about replication in general. A lot of people are planning to switch to GTIDs to simplify administration.
• Speaking to users at the booth about our new Workbench 6.0 GA – everyone is excited.
• Participating in our Storage Engine Partner Meeting, and talking about some of the new optimizer enhancements in 5.6 – MRR, BKA and ICP.
• InnoDB changes in 5.7, nice to read Sunny’s blog and note we don’t need to explicitly start read-only transactions.
• 5.6.14 and 5.5.34 releases.

The folks at Ubuntu are running a contest to see who can write the best juju charm!
Juju is Ubuntu’s cloud deployment/service orchestration tool. Charms are
the scripts used by juju to do software deployment and management.
Currently MySQL has ~8800 downloads from the Charm Store, making it
the most popular service deployed with Juju.
The contest runs until October 22, and has over $60K in prizes to be won. For more information see:
https://github.com/juju/charm-championship.