Opinions, Expertise, Passion.

Seems hard to believe, I’ve been in Germany almost a month. I’ve not seen much, certainly haven’t gone anywhere outside of walking distance from my home/work. Of course I’ve spent 1 1/2 weeks of my time back in San Francisco/Silicon Valley for the MySQL Conference and Expo.

Life has developed somewhat of a routine, get up, get ready, take out the garbage, walk to work. Had an exceptionally bad night sleeping last night (with a general night, being poor one can imagine) causing a later start. Walk around the corner for lunch, today I had to tackle the post office for sending to a previous (for me) MySQL employee, and I was most grateful for the help of a colleague who assisted me in translation.

Leave work, go to the supermarket, I do this each day, just so I can get a few things I can carry home. It’s amazing how much a single human being consumes. Generally I catch the 112 bus home.

Today’s shopping including finding light bulbs, as I blew not one, but two over the weekend. It took some time, and well it’s difficult to ask for help, I’ve generally found that English is not understood, at least easily so I try not to try. Also had to revisit and buy the right salt. With everything in German one even when trying to digest as much detail you can still mess up. Something else to eat, to cook for dinner, which has become routine, again the language and pretty much lack of knowing anybody, or at least anybody saying, hey come out for dinner.

I’ve managed to find the translation rather more difficult then expected. I only know a few poor words of German, and I’d like to learn more, just swamped with trying to define my role in a new position, so that takes all my energies, and stresses. My mobile phone sends me text messages in German, which I’ve pretty much ignored. Today realizing it was voicemail, attempted to connect to voicemail, that’s all in German speaking too, so give up there. I forget to mention, the supplied manual was in German (but at least I could download an English version). Tried to install some software today, it’s in German. What is this, Germany or something.

At home, I’ve managed a routine. I’ve constructed a rudimentary working area, old uncomfortable chairs and a round table do not make for a good and comfortable place I sit. I’ve got a keyboard box (finally a US keyboard I had to wait to go back to get), a speaker from supplied radio (only one English music channel I’ve found anyway, and 3 carefully placed books, gives me a not very stable but working elevation for my laptop screen.

I might if motivated turn on the television, but again that’s all German too. I know when I arrived I had CNN via cable in the hotel, just the one station in English. I found out that free digital is available, so was prepared to pull out my USB Cable stick, only to realize I’d left the aerial in storage in New York. Drat. Still I’m working on my laptop, playing CNN will both get boring after a time, and take away from me being able to work.

You blink, and it’s like 8:45pm, it’s still light outside. Time to think about cooking dinner.

Playing Scrabble via FaceBook has become an important part of sanity. Only have two friends playing, and it can take a day for a move, so it gives me a few minutes.

I did get to see something today, that I wanted to see be it brief for 30 seconds. The Beluga past by the office in view this afternoon. This oversized modified Airbus is what is used to transport parts for the new Airbus 380 which is still rather plagued in mainline production. I also heard that the Airbus company is actually a European Government initiative, not a company with roots in one country, formed by Germany, France, Britain and Spain. This would explain why it’s built in different places and shipped around for assembly.

So all in all, not too much wow about a new country this last week. I have the enjoyable task of heading to Australia this weekend, not that enjoyable as it’s a long flight, three actually just to get there, and then returning home via US (that’s 5 more flights). It’s all traveling East, which sucks in comparison to traveling West.

Almost forgot to mention as the smoke wafts in. Window open to let some air in, but only long enough to some smoker, I think below me lights up and then it’s terrible. The weather in Hamburg has been unpredictable, rather Melbourne like, hot, cold, wet. Had all these today.

I got to see a little of Hamburg in the last day. It started with the sights and sounds of the ReeperBahn in Hamburg. I managed to get a tour by a MySQL employee, Kay which really made the entire translation thing easier. Indian dinner, a few stops for a beer or two, including a beach setting bar area which was rather cool. No talking to unknown German women occurred but I got to experience while heading home to stay on the right side of the road and avoid the prostitutes area which was clearly pointed out earlier. I suspect the area with clubs, brothels and sex shops would get to be a rough place later at night.

The Altonaer Fischmarkt, or Fish Market in English, provided for some passing of time on Sunday. It’s litterally five minutes walk away and I suspect I got a larger dosage and timeframe of operation then expected as the Hamburg Marathon was in play, well just outside my door really as well.

Not game enough to start buying fresh food, and fish but I did manage a few souviner tee-shirts for my trip home.

My Photos

In the recent interview Missed Twitter Questions from Jonathan Schwartz Interview at Web 2.0 Expo Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz is quoted as saying “Everything Sun delivers will be freely available, via a free and open license (either GPL, LGPL or Mozilla/CDDL), to the community.”

Presently not everything is under one of these licenses. Java getting fully Open Source highlights that Java is getting there, but still contains closed source components. Open Solaris, NetBeans, Glassfish, Virtual Box and Open Office are. Even the mainline Solaris 10 is. Star Office is one that is not.

MySQL is also not there and presently has at least three different licenses. You have GPL for the MySQL Community Server. You have a subscription model for MySQL Enterprise which includes additional bug fixes not available in the Community Server. The subscription model also includes the MySQL Enterprise Monitor, software that will fail to operate if your subscription lapses. Additional upcoming MySQL Proxy features will also be subscription or have been termed “closed source” only. You also have the different model used by MySQL Workbench for licenses.

I know many that work on these products at MySQL do not agree with the various license policies. Indeed recent comments from Rich Green of Sun have also indicated we are not going to change anything at MySQL.

I was initially interested if Sun would move MySQL to the CDDL, however this question was recently raised and Marten Mickos stated there were no plans to move away from the GPL v2.

I can only hope that as Sun continues to promote itself as the largest open source company, these differences subside and disappear, and don’t continue to evolve and change.

I’m migrating my existing WordPress run blog site at blog.arabx.com.au to a my new site ronaldbradford.com (which is not yet publically available)

As part of this process I’ll be doing a number of upgrades/changes including:

1. Update blog software to 2.5.1 from 2.0.2 (I’d previously done a 2.0.2 upgrade to 2.3.2, but not deployed)
2. Migrate to new domain
3. Upgrade existing MySQL 5.1 version from 5.1.11 to 5.1.24
4. Migrate database to using MySQL 5.1.24, from 5.0.22 (my server runs 5.0 and 5.1 instances)
5. Split my blog into Professional & Personal

Upgrading
The upgrade is straightforward, backup database, download latest wordpress software. I run full revision to older versions via directories + symlinks so my installation is more complicated, but fully recoverable. Install, and run upgrade script. That all works, but my site breaks. Suspecting is my heavily customized them, by disabling that my site is up. One to add to the TODO list.

Migrate to new domain
Dump + Reload data into new schema. Copy Wordpress install. I had to make two data changes to correctly use the new domain.


update wp_options set option_value='http://ronaldbradford.com/blog' where option_name='siteurl';
update wp_options set option_value='http://ronaldbradford.com/blog' where option_name='home';


Upgrade MySQL 5.1 version
That was also relatively straightforward. I was surprised I was running such an old 5.1.11, but I remember originally using 5.1.6 in production use before that.

Migrate database to 5.1 from 5.0
This is where my problems have begun. Wordpress does not appear to like host+port stuff. I can confirm access via MySQL client. At 9:30pm Sunday night, this may have to remain in the unresolved bin for a few days.

By drinking “Brainiac” at Google of course.

All my photos from the Conference Here

April 25^th, 2008 - by Ronald Bradford

Welcome to the 94^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of the database blogsphere. Adding to the list of usual database suspects, I have some more alternative considerations for our readers this week.

We start with Conferences

Still some discussion from last weeks’ 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo.

Baron “xarpb” Schwartz calls it correct in Like it or not, it is the MySQL Conference and Expo. Matt Assay of c|net gives us some of his opinions in three posts Two great posts on MySQL, Back to the future for MySQL and Between two consenting corporations… in followup to last week’s active slashdot discussion. Many others have also commented if you have not been following the news released before opening keynotes.

If you didn’t get a hard copy, Sheeri Kritzer Cabral has published the Pythian EXPLAIN Cheatsheet many attendees received.

Also last week was Collaborate 08 - Technology and Applications IOUG forum for the Oracle Community.

This week we also see the Web 2.0 San Francisco in action, and excitement is also brewing for the PGCon - PostgreSQL Conference for Users and Developers happening in under a month as Robert Treat has Plane tickets booked for PGCon. Postgres was also visible at the MySQL Conference & Expo if you were looking with a prominent consulting team downing the blue elephant during the event. Wish I’d taken a photo now!

Still more news from Adam Machanic of the Pythian group with SQLTeach Toronto: Almost Here.

Common threads

The 2008 Google Summer of Code announced this week showcases the Open Source databases MySQL (14 projects) and PostgreSQL (6 projects). Kaj Arnö talks more in Fourteen Summer of Code projects accepted 2008. The company PrimeBase Technologies also features strongly with two projects for the Blob Streaming storage engine for MySQL as I detail in Media Blob Streaming getting a Google boost.

MySQL

DTrace Integration with MySQL 5.0 - Chime demo in MySQL Users Conference 2008 by Jenny Chen is an example of Sun’s Open Source contribution to MySQL which I saw as a physical demo last week. Unfortunately, due to the imbalance in actually getting new functionality into Community contributions (actually non existence in current or next mysql version :-(), this functionality is only really for show. Dtrace with MySQL 6.0.5 - on a Mac describes some of this work actually making it into the next, next version. It seems this next Falcon Preview is available but not announced by MySQL generally as I note in Continued confusion in MySQL/Sun release policy.

MySQL Gurus Mark Callaghan and Brian Aker comment respectively here and here on MySQL Heap (Memory) Engine - Dynamic Row Format Support. Work submitted by Igor Chernyshev of eBay Kernel Team (whom I’ve met previously and was most impressed with his ability to submit MySQL patch work, with little previous MySQL kernel knowledge, but extensive C++ knowledge). This work also contributed to eBay Wins Application of the Year at MySQL Conference & Expo.

Mark also mentions in his post “How do users get it? There is no community branch into which people can submit changes with a GPL license.“. A topic your’s truly has also mentioned regarding the Community contributions, development and release. Perhaps a sign of more benefit to the community soon as Monty mentions.

Baron Schwartz comments on Keith “a.k.a Kevin” Murphy’s work in Spring 2008 issue of MySQL Magazine. With a quick plug also for his upcoming book “High Performance MySQL - Version 2″ (me giving it a plug also now), Baron also has the best published anti-spam sniffer email I’ve seen, and recently updated to his new employer. Check his blog and let me know.

Postgres

Joshus Drake of Command Prompt Inc. The Postgres Company gets excited in Is that performance I smell? Ext2 vs Ext3 on 50 spindles, testing for PostgreSQL and gives us some insight into different settings of two popular file system types. It would be great to see a follow up with a few more different filesystems types.

Pabloj “so many trails … so little time” extends his MySQL example to Postgres in Loading data from files. And on Postgres Online Journal, we get An Almost Idiot’s Guide to PostgreSQL YUM giving you a step by step guide of PostgreSQL setup, including the all important “Backing up Old Version”.

Oracle

We get a detailed book chapter from Keith Lake of Oracle OLAP The most powerful, open Analytic Engine in his extensive post on Tuning Guidance for OLAP 10g. David Litchfield brings attention in A New Class of Vulnerability in Oracle: Lateral SQL Injection. The title is sufficient for all Oracle DBA’s to review.

Don Seiler gives his experience in Bind Variables and Parallel Queries Do Not Mix when an Oracle Bug is discovered the database to 64-bit H/W..
Matching LOB Indexes and Segments by Michael McLaughlin gives us a good CASE/REGEX SQL example exam question, and simple output to monitor the growth of LOBs in your Oracle database.
Additional readings for Oracle folks can be found with Kenneth Downs writing Advanced Table Design: Resolutions and Dan Norris’ Collaborate 08 thoughts gives a concise review of a largely attended Oracle event.

SQL Server

B Esakkiappan’s SQL Thoughts gives us a throughout lesson on SQL Server 2005 Database Transaction logs with Know the Transaction LOG - Part - 1, Part - 2, Part - 3 and Part -4 Restoring Data.

Paul S. Randal of SQL Skills adds Conference Questions Pot-Pourri: How to create Agent alerts to his writings following many requests after a recent workshop.

In Scalability features I would like to have in SQL Server Michael Zilberstein lists 3 key features including “Active-Active cluster”, “Indexes per partition” and “Bitmap indexes and function based indexes”.

Ingres, Times Ten, Google App Engine and more

Some movement in the Ingres world with Deb Woods of Ingres Technology Blog discussing in Inside the Community - Ingres style…. the Ingres Engineering Summit occurring this week. Attendees included newbies to a 24 year Ingres veteran. That beats my experience in Ingres which now extends 19 years.

We get another very detailed installation description, this time for Times Ten in Install Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database 7.0.4 on Linux.

Just a few weeks ago, a new database offering hit the market with the Google App Engine. News this week includes
Google App Engine Hack-a-thons! being announced with events in New York on May 7th and San Francisco on May 16th. As a developer with an account and an excuse to use it more, I can’t win, being in the right towns on the wrong dates.

OakLeaf Systems this week writes Comparing Google App Engine, Amazon SimpleDB and Microsoft SQL Server Data Services. Another good read just for comparison.

Not in a blog, but in discussion in at the recent MySQL, was msql. It was interesting to find out that PHP was originally developed for msql first, and only used MySQL as the preferred database after some functionality requirement. Interesting what could have been?

In Conclusion

Thanks Dave for the opportunity to contribute to the week in review. Until my chance to charm the readers next time.

I leave you with a photo, and challenge our readers to find another person who would be capable of wearing a t-shirt that states “My free software runs your company”. Michael Widenius- Founder and original developer of MySQL can, and my thanks to you for MySQL, and the Vodka shots at the Conference last week.

Happy Earth Day 2008!

I was prompted following a few key words by Marten Mickos at the Sun Dinner on Wednesday evening, and subsequent one on one discussion with Marten, to post my thoughts of some significant news this week announced at the MySQL Conference. The decision to provide as it’s been termed is “Enterprise only features”. It is unfortunate this was not discussed in Marten’s opening keynote, having been exposed the evening before in the Partner’s meeting and hitting the blog sphere before the conference officially started.

MySQL, past, present and future as an Open Source company requires a functional business model to succeed. This includes the funding of resources and the technology progression. It is also necessary in this business climate to build a successful business quickly. How do you do this? Well that’s probably the difference between a successful CEO and an unsuccessful one, and what Marten Mickos has produced is clearly very successful.

I may not necessarily agree with the decisions made, more specifically not understanding at this time the rationale of which features are free and which are likely to be commercial, but I respect the decision made by Marten Mickos. These new feature considerations are in a future release of MySQL, they are also I’m sure not yet set in stone, however MySQL can not be all things to all people, no software can. It reminds me of the Homer Simpson car, designed to do everything Homer wanted in a car, but it bankrupted the previously successful company due the views of one individual to solve all their own needs, but not the needs of the majority. Who is affected by this decision, who will benefit, again it’s too early to tell.

Monty indicates this is a MySQL decision, not a Sun decision. This indicates the transition of MySQL to being under the Sun banner of the largest open source company is well, still in transition. Today it was again confirmed to me, that the MySQL database will always be GPL and MySQL will not never revoke the functionality that powers the world’s largest websites as free software for the database server.

As an advocate for the MySQL community, I’d like to consider myself one of the pulses, a thought in the MySQL conscious and even a vocal lobbyist. I am however not interested in being a disruptor in the MySQL ecosystem. A Communications Lesson on Slashdot I believe correctly states “Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL.” The headline is wrong.

A number of people have posted their comments, let’s stop bickering about it, and let’s see something positive happen for the benefit of the community. For example, as I’ve mentioned previously regarding the lack of differentiation for the Community version, again mentioned by Mark Callaghan in A better (community) HEAP engine where a worthwhile patch can’t be of benefit to the community in a binary release for the lay person.

When in management, I am responsible for contributing to the success of the company, to play a significant role in the functional business model, to ensure funding for resources and technology progression. In other terms, how can revenue generation be achieved to fund prominently salaries of staff, including my own. How am I going to do this? This will be the difference between my huge success or not.

In review of some list posts today, I came across the Falcon Preview 6.0.5 downloads available from the MySQL Forge (even that is unclear, but the directory indicates this on the forge). The Forge Wiki Documentation indicates the 6.0.5 release features (without a download link), however the official MySQL downloads for 6.0, and the directory structure for all MySQL releases only describes 6.0.4.

Nothing in the MySQL News and Events of this new release. The documentation for 6.0.5 is also unclear as it lists this version as Not Yet Released.

This comes on the heels of “Pending General Availability/near-final release candidate” (See here and here), and the Press Releases for Sun Celebrates Third-Party MySQL Storage Engines only to be negated by Sun Microsystems Announces MySQL 5.1 which broke the plugins as they were not compatible.

I don’t wish to create confusion, but it’s unclear what is happening here, not withstanding the new preview only has 5 builds and excludes Mac OS/X which means I can’t natively test.

The 2008 Google Summer of Code MySQL Projects are now available. MySQL has 14 listed projects, one of the ~190 different Open Source products listed. Unfortunately there is no summary to see the total number of projects being sponsored across all products.

Media Blob Streaming actually has the luxury of two approved projects, so they have plenty of mentoring work at PrimeBase Technologies.

Raj Kissu Rajandran will be working on BLOB Streaming Support for phpMyAdmin and KishoreKumar Bairi on Streaming Enabled MySQL Driver for PHP. Welcome to world of open source for your respective projects.

Jay’s opening lines regarding the final MySQL Conference keynote speaker was: “I work with a lot of data. I think peta-bytes, maybe exa-bytes”. This was relating to Jacek Becla from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, giving his presentation on “The Science and Fiction of Petascale Analytics”.

The goal of the Large Synoptics Survey Telescope (LSST) is the storage of 50+ PB of images and 20+ PB data.
Let’s just clarify the size. 20 PB of data = 20 years of HD Movies = 2000 years of 128kb MP3

The next database frontier is obviously building huge databases. What part will MySQL or other relational databases play? Some interesting facts were.

• The Digital Universe Created 161 Exabytes of data last year.
• Google, processes 20 petabytes of data per day.

The Operational plan for LSST Project Timeline is 10 years, only starting in 2014. The timeline:

• 2009 Choosing Technology
• 2010-2014 constructions
• 2014-2023 production

The primary goals are: Scale, parallelize, fault tolerant.

Last year I started taking photographs of Vehicle Number Plates. No specific reason why, more something to pass the time. I was more interested in special number plates, and I’ve collected onces such as “LINUX”, “POSIX”, “POLICE”, “SOCCER”, “MOO”, “GOLFNUT”, “MYSQL1″, “BUG OFF” (On a VW Bug), “BMW NOT”, “GO SOX” (from 2 different states), “HOT AIR”, and “MMMMMUD” to name a few.

It took about 4 weeks to get 48 states in the US when I started. The 49th came several months later, and this was West Virginia. Today, many months later I got the 50th state - Wyoming (the least populist state). WOOT!

You can find a view of the 50 states here.

The slides from my 2008 MySQL Conference Presentation can be downloaded from here.

A: Maria, an ACID, MVCC engine that plans to be the default non-transactional and default transactional engine for MySQL.

Presently development with a team of 6 people and plans of adding 2-3 developers the work on Maria should see the 1.5 release this month.

It was great to here Monty say “We have a policy of zero MySQL Bugs, like the old MySQL way.”

Maria Version History
1.0 - “Crash Safe” — part of a existing 5.1 branch
1.5 - “Concurrent insert/select” to be merged as part of formal MySQL 6.0 release
2.0 - Transactional and ACID
3.0 - High Concurrency & Online Backup
4.0 - Data Warehousing

The schedule has all of the features to be available for the next MySQL Conference Q2 2009

Some points of note:

• This is a MyISAM replacement.
• It was interesting to hear about log file size (suggesting being big like 1G), and there are not circular. New log files will be created, and only files purged only when no longer used.
• There has been a change in default page size, presently defaulting to 8K for both data and indexes.
• Maria 1.5 does not support INSERT DELAYED and FullText and GIS indexes are not crash safe.
• There are extensive tests in the MySQL Test Suite
• Will support READ COMMITTED and REPEATABLE READ (available in 1.5)
• Every part of the development and process is open an available documentation (unlike some other storage engines Monty mentions)
• Have a drop everything policy on new bugs to have Maria as stable as possible.
• Check out the blog at monty-says.blogspot.com

What would be great if people could create a single line (one tip) from each talk and we could aggregate these for an executive summary for tech people.

This was prompted from only a few minutes looking in on Baron Shwartz’s EXPLAIN presentation. What I didn’t know was.

EXPLAIN EXTENDED SELECT …; SHOW WARNINGS; gives the rewritten SQL query

If only I had time to whip out an application on my Google AppEngine and get twitter feeds with say a mysqlconf keyword. Perhaps we need a all night BoF hackfest to do it.

A small but committed group met at 8:30pm to hear more about our the plans from PrimeBase Technologies here at the 2008 MySQL Conference. Our discussion started in true MySQL form.

Monty Widenius presents to the group plastic cups and a bottle of Absolut Vodka.
After a shot, Paul starts with “While I can still talk”.
Monty, slams another bottle of Vodka on the table.
We all laugh.

Paul outlined some of the roadmap plans from existing the Alpha release to Beta releases.
He talked about the plans for Synchronous Replication and there was active discussion on various use cases.
There was also discussion and input on Solid State Drive (SDD) Technology which will be tested with PBXT in the coming months.