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.

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.

"Save MySQL"; my 2 cents.

There is no denying that MySQL has a huge amount of momentum behind it. 10+ years as the leading free SQL database kinda does that. It has successfully changed the perception of databases - where people used to visualise big-iron mainframes in specially cooled rooms to where anyone can install it for free within 15 minutes.

That is not what this blog post is about. The topic of today is the "Save MySQL" campaign and how I believe it is unnecessary.

In fact, I believe that it could be harmful.

Like Anders, I have mostly been refraining from participating in this campaign but now I think it would be helpful for people to know my reasoning why.

Let us consider some scenarios:

1. Oracle acquires Sun, ceases MySQL development.
   
   This would be a Pyrrhic victory for Oracle as the community would immediately coalesce around MariaDB / popular forks. Everything continues... except the MySQL trademark.
   
   Oracle is not that stupid.
   
   
2. Oracle acquires Sun, allows MySQL development to continue as before.
   
   In my opinion, this would be the worst possible scenario for MySQL/MariaDB/forks as it would divide and fragment the community as the codebases diverge.
   
   Are the "Save MySQL" campaigners really trying to achieve this goal?
   
   
3. Oracle does not acquire Sun, Sun continues MySQL development as before.
   
   See previous point. Equally disastrous.
   
   
4. Sun sells MySQL intellectial property to third party. Oracle may or may not acquire Sun.
   
   Who would the third party be? Sun shareholders would be very annoyed if the sale was for less than $1bn... and rightfully so! Who has the cash to pay $1bn for a open-source database? I doubt that IBM would come to the rescue here as I doubt that there is enough IP in MySQL alone to interest them and the SAP bridge has already been burned.
   
   

So, what do I want to happen? That is a good question. There are a lot of tough decisions which has to be made to complete MySQL/MariaDB/etc. I like that MariaDB is being developed by Monty and many other long-time MySQL developers: A part of me wishes to be working with them to help shape it's future.

Perhaps "MySQL" should become like "Linux". A brand owned by a benevolent organization and permits many distributions to use it to name their database product. The "MySQL" brand would require that so named software be GPL, share a common protocol and SQL dialect. There would be an open MySQL Compatibility Test kit which would test distros for compatibility to some "gold standard".

Perhaps that is what I would like.

Perl Stored Procedures for MySQL

Files used in conference presentation here: UC2009 presentation

I think todays presentation for Perl Stored Procedures for MySQL was quite successful. The audience was quite engaged and asked questions throughout (yes, I invited questions through the talk). I made sure to mention Eric Herman's Java plugin because even though he didn't get time to submit a talk, the work is noteworthy. Sometimes I worry that my accent may make it harder for people to understand what I was talking about so I tried to talk as clearly as I could. Note to self: I should have a bottle of water on the table for myself the next time I do a talk.

The audience seemed to enjoy the demonstration part of the talk. I think it drew the appropriate amount of chuckles. One attendee said that the demo alone made his day at the conference worthwhile. Compared to last year, I think it was the right decision to split the presentation into one targeting developers wanting to get into the internals and a presentation simply to target end users.

I just hope that the communication with the MySQL/Sun/Oracle community contribution team continues and we can get this work into the main tree where more people can make use of it.

Launchpad Project Repository: https://launchpad.net/sakila-server/wl820
Source and downloadable resources: https://launchpad.net/mysql-wl820/trunk/5.1.33-wl820

External Stored Procedures for MySQL

Finished my presentation earlier this afternoon. I had a better audience than last year and there was interest in the download URL for the source tarballs so I hope to see people hacking on it soon.

The link to the presentation is here.

There has been lots of good communication with staff from MySQL^WSun Microsystems^W^WOracle so maybe we shall see this code to begin to be integrated soon. In other news, there was the MySQL 5.4 announcement. I'll pull the code and have a play...