Oracle's MySQL Connect 2013 conference summary

Although, hosting the event on a weekend, which is an inconvenience to those who have family, and ignoring the fact that it's Oracle's third MySQL Connect event, I would have to say that this year's Oracle MySQL Connect conference was the best one yet.

This past year, I have been mostly heads-down working at +LinkedIn so I haven't been paying close attention to what Oracle has been doing for +MySQL 5.7 so it was a good educational experience for me, looking at what Oracle's MySQL engineers, in partnership with other engineers from Facebook, Google and Booking.com, have cooked up.

Also, I had enjoyed chatting with past colleagues, particularly +Gerardo Narvaja who has inspired me to try out the community open-source TokuDB for use with OQGraph v3. A few hiccups with building it on my MacOS 10.7 Lion laptop but I was otherwise eventually successful using Apple's toolchain.

I think that the best takeaway of the conference is that, with the exclusion of a Oracle-to-MySQL migration tool, the Oracle MySQL engineering team is busy and actively improving MySQL faster than at any other time during the past 5 years since SUN's acquisition of MySQL. Has Oracle been a better steward for MySQL than SUN? Indeed, without doubt: It is.

That all said, I do have my own personal wish-list for the future, many of them equally apply to the open-source fork, MariaDB.

• I would like an easy email address, a mailing list with a publicly visible archive, where I can fling my open-source patches for inclusion into future MySQL, perhaps both for the current stable (for small patches) and for the next DMR.
• Connector/MXJ, I can compromise - at least reinstate its pages and docs as a 'deprecated' or 'unmaintained' project... or maybe 'maintained by community'.
• InnoDB file-per-schema will be nice. I hear that user-defined table-spaces will be a MySQL 5.7 feature which would satisfy my want.
• InnoDB per-table heuristic for buffer-pool page eviction - some table-spaces may be stored on a faster medium, such as flash or flash-cached disk and so these pages should be eligible for eviction before evicting pages for traditional disk storage.
• Continue to work with Percona to ensure that xtrabackup continues to work.
• Work with community for plugable parsers, stored routines and abstract data types.
• Work with community so that third-party storage engines and plugins are available for official releases as add-on downloads. (Oracle provides no warranty for third-party code, blah, blah, blah).

In summary, it was a good conference with a few minor observations:

• Would be nicer if it wasn't on a weekend due to family.
• 8:30am start on a Sunday? Really?
• Tea/coffee/water at breaks would be appreciated.
• Non-claustrophobic presentation rooms would be nice.
• Better availability of power outlets in presentation rooms would be very nice.
• 4 concurrent tracks would be better.
• Schedule handout did not indicate presenter.
• Schedule handout maps were initially confusing.
• SSH on wifi didn't work on Saturday.

"Making bank" at MySQL (AB/INC)

Just because this topic came up more than once at MySQL Connect...

Apparently, some alumni have been awarded bonuses for certain pieces of work during their time at MySQL and I guess that there was an expectation from some that the same applied to the work I did. Now, I don't want anyone to get the impression that I am experiencing "sour grapes" over the past - I actually enjoyed much of my time at MySQL. I also made many good friends of which I am happy to have stayed in contact with many of them to this day. I must say, it is the people that I miss the most when I move from one job to the next. What made working for MySQL a bit different is how we interacted with each other, which was mostly through IRC and email; we only met in person perhaps once or twice a year in our developer or company meetings at some exotic location.

 So I want to clear the air by revealing all about my bonuses at MySQL.

I have never received any bonus or award for any work or project at MySQL. This includes the plugins framework, the audit plugin interface, stored procedures, storage engines or anything else I may have touched while I worked for MySQL. I was never promised any award or bonus for any work related to plugins, parsers or stored procedures.

There was some hand-wavy hints for several storage engine side projects: There was some wishy-washy verbal hints about something for Project Amira passing the SAP VERI test but that project was cancelled soon after that condition was met for reasons several levels above my pay grade. As everyone knows, verbal promises are only worth as much as the paper its written on.

I was never offered and nor have I ever received any gift for publicly rejecting SUN's original P.I.A.

I was not a particularly well paid MySQL contractor/employee. I actually took a very significant pay cut from leaving my previous workplace by going to MySQL. From what I was kinda indirectly told by SUN's on-boarding team, I was among the lowest annual salary MySQL employee at the time of their acquisition of MySQL and the lowest of the engineers working within the USA.

I did not "make bank" at MySQL.

I did it for the joy.

Scrubbed history

I distinctly remember creating and committing this code... and it has largely not changed.
Yet, it seems that my name was scrubbed from its history.

$ bzr blame -q include/mysql/plugin_audit.h | grep antony | wc -l

       0

Sad-face.

=-(

OQGraph and TokuDB

Today, while at Oracle's MySQL Connect conference in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to talk to Gerardo Narvaja and that inspired me to try using OQGraphv3 and TokuDB.
Of course, the first challenge is to compile it on my MacBook which has MacOS Lion 10.7.
I installed the Apple's latest XCode Command Line tools and eventually compiled a MariaDB which had both TokuDB and OQGraph available together.

This is using the opensource TokuDB release.

Data load was pleasantly fast!

And it worked!

Talking to Jerry, he gave me a few ideas how to optimize the query performance... More later, the laptop's battery is nearly flat!

QA and bug fixing for OQGraph

Just mentioning it here because hard work deserves to be recognised and mentioned: Andrew McDonnell is doing an awesomely good job of testing, understanding and fixing bugs in OQGraph... which is no mean feat because the core of the code is based on the Boost Graph Library which isn't a trivial C++ library.

I want to contribute,

Over at David Stoke's Open Source DBA blog, the following was posted:

http://opensourcedba.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/mysql-is-looking-for-external-contributions

My reply: Allow me to contribute code with a BSD (3-clause) license without having to sign anything new and then we can talk.
Don’t tell me that it can’t be done: Oracle already has some code of mine in another product which was contributed under a BSD (3-clause) license.

Using Perl Stored Procedures for MariaDB, slides uploaded.

Just recently did the presentation and Q&A for the Using Perl Stored Procedures presentation at Percona Live 2013.

The presentation has been uploaded:

Using Perl Stored Procedures for MariaDB from Antony T Curtis

(repeat posting because planet.mysql.com didn't notice it the first time around)

Using Perl Stored Procedures for MariaDB

Just recently did the presentation and Q&A for the Using Perl Stored Procedures presentation at Percona Live 2013.

The presentation has been uploaded:

Using Perl Stored Procedures for MariaDB from Antony T Curtis

OQGraph presentation at SCaLE 11x

I did a presentation on OQGraph for the +Southern California Linux Expo on Sunday and some of the audience seemed really interested. Demonstrated finding the shortest path in a graph of millions of edges, with a deliberately crippled config running in a VirtualBox environment.

(edit, updated URLs on slides)