In this episode we talk about string data types, comparing them to the ISO:2003 SQL standard.
Gerry has joined Tokutek - Congrats Gerry! We interviewed Martin from Tokutek in episode 86.
Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!
The explain statement can be an important tool for understanding how a query is being executed and what you can do to make it run better. Although the output of EXPLAIN is relatively straightforward it can be confusing to inexperienced users or can be mangled by terminal wrapping.
To help with these problems as well as provide a pastebin for MariaDB developers to share explains during development we created The MariaDB/MySQL Explain Analyzer. This tool:
This is the first release so there are still improvements to make. If you have any suggestions, feature requests or bug reports please let us know.
For more information, please see this KB article.
This week we present how to use pt-archiver and pt-find, two Percona Toolkit tools. We focus on the common usage of the tools and the gotchas we ran into using them.
News/Events/Feedback
Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!
It feels like every minute a PHP developer somewhere on this planet starts implementing something aching to a CMS from scratch. Some do it because their project is "so big" it that it "obviously needs" a custom solution. Some do it because their project is "so small" it "obviously needs" just a few days of hacking .. to build a custom solution. Let me briefly focus on the later group. Working in a company with less than 10 people building websites for customers a project needs a bit of a CMS to manage those 10 "semi static" pages seems to be the poster child example of this group. The devs whip up a DB table, slap an ORM in front, maybe even use some generator for the admin UI. Done. Later the clients also wants versioning and luckily many ORMs provide some solution for that. Easy. Permissions? Most frameworks provide some ACL system. Child pages? ORM has some tree algorithm supported. Fulltext search? Integrate ElasticSearch. Custom page types? Uhm well by now you have enough sunken costs that you will make that happen somehow too. Some morning you wake up and you have created the next Drupal or Typo3. If you did, then it would be hard to claim that you did it wrong because both are very successful projects. What PHPCR aims to be is to provide you with a short cut for this path. Or in other words there should be a PHPCR implementation that is so easy to use, with so many helpful higher level components in your favorite framework, that it becomes the natural choice for your next CMS needing project.
Every time anyone talks about PHPCR, they will mention Jackrabbit sooner or later as it is the basis for the currently most mature PHPCR implementation. Here, I just did it too. Jackrabbit requires Java. More importantly it is not trivial and most of you have never heard about it, let alone used it. I think for many high scale use cases its great that PHPCR has been integrated with Jackrabbit, but it needs to be relegated to a side note you mention when someone starts talking about scaling to millions of documents and many GBs of data. Once there is a PHPCR implementation that works with pure PHP, using any RDBMS (including SQLite which is bundled with PHP) it will become easier to just use that instead of whipping up your own tables. No more convincing the sys-admin guy about adding a new daemon to the setup. Instead being able to tell the client what other features they could get in the next code sprint.
So today, we are not there yet. We have an implementation of PHPCR that works on top of Doctrine DBAL to in theory support any RDBMS. Well in reality it already does though the search API only works with MySQL and PostgreSQL. It also doesn't support versioning and ACLs. Oh and if you drop more than 50 documents into it, search performance will start to hurt quickly. Bummer. But there is good news too. The core infrastructure is laid out thanks to Benjamin. Progress on it, while not rocket fast, is continuous thanks to Liip intern Adrien .. as a matter of fact if you go to our demo page it would run all but the admin interface on top of it just fine (yes this includes the cool inline editing!).
I believe that a decently experienced database developer would need a man month to fix up the searching to perform decently unto lets say 1k documents as well as implement simple versioning on top of SQLite. Another 2 man months should enable implementing permissions and support for even more documents, ACLs and a few other goodies. Is this something that a 10 developer company can commit to when offering that simple CMS solution to one of their customers? Obviously not. This takes a few developers who are willing to invest into the future. Until they come along unfortunately PHPCR will continue to not be a viable option for many small CMS projects.
This week we talk about MariaDB - explaining features, and comparing to Percona's patched MySQL and Oracle's MySQL. MariaDB is touted as "a better MySQL, not a different MySQL". MariaDB is the 2nd most popular open source database, even more popular than Postgres.
Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!
On Friday last week, after the intensive days of the conference, Ars Technica wrote and published a nice article about MariaDB including many of the messages we had been delivering during the conference, http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/mysql-founders-latest-mariadb-release-takes-enterprise-features-open-source.ars.
MariaDB seals
Last year, when it became clear that O’Reilly wasn’t going to arrange the MySQL user conference in the future, there was a lot of discussion on who should arrange it. In the end Percona was pretty fast informing everyone that they had booked the convention center in Santa Clara to arrange the conference this year. Now with the results to hand it’s easy to say that the conference was very well arranged. Great work Percona!
The MariaDB booth was located in the .Org section of the expo hall and we experienced a huge crowd, especially on the first day (Wednesday) of the conference. Our t-shirts were really popular and we could probably have handed out even double the amount of what we had with us. Unfortunately for those in attendance, we had to put some aside for our next upcoming event in Bellingham, WA, USA 28-29th of April. It’s the LinuxFest Northwest 2012, http://linuxfestnorthwest.org. We hope to see some of you there!
We released MariaDB 5.5.23 GA on Tuesday of the conference. Apparently people just loved this news and we’ve enjoyed double our usual download rates since then.
On the SkySQL MariaDB Solutions Day on Friday the 13th, the MySQL founders Monty and David started the day with a panel and the day continued with sessions on all kinds of MariaDB and MySQL related topics. Make sure you read SkySQL’s summary, http://www.skysql.com/blogs/jenwilbur/seal-you-next-year-successful-mysql-friday-13th-santa-clara.
SkySQL has also posted pictures of the event on https://www.facebook.com/skysql.
Happy panelist Monty
During the conference we had many interesting conversations with people and businesses that we haven’t had a chance to meet before who had migrated to MariaDB. I’m certain there will be even more of these discussions this year and next.
To stay up to date with MariaDB, add yourself to the MariaDB announce list, which informs mainly about new releases. Also add yourself to the MariaDB Facebook page to get even more MariaDB news. Sign up at http://mariadb.org.
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.5.23. This stable (GA) release incorporates MariaDB 5.3.6 and MySQL 5.5.23, some performance improvements, and bug fixes.
Please see the What is MariaDB 5.5 page for an overview of MariaDB 5.5.
Sources, binaries, and package downloads are available from our network of MariaDB mirrors. Debian and Ubuntu packages are available from our mirrored apt repositories. We have a sources.list generator for creating sources.list entries.
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.3.6. This stable (GA) release incorporates MySQL 5.1.62, some performance improvements, and several bug fixes.
Most importantly, MariaDB 5.3.6 includes a fix for a bug which, under certain rare circumstances, allowed a user to connect with an invalid password. This is a serious security issue. We recommend upgrading from older versions as soon as possible.
Please see the What is MariaDB 5.3 page for an overview of MariaDB 5.3.
Sources, binaries, and package downloads are available from our network of MariaDB mirrors. Debian and Ubuntu packages are available from our mirrored apt repositories. We have a sources.list generator for creating sources.list entries.
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.3.6. This stable (GA) release incorporates MySQL 5.1.62, some performance improvements, and several bug fixes.
Most importantly, MariaDB 5.3.6 includes a fix for a bug which, under certain rare circumstances, allowed a user to connect with an invalid password. This is a serious security issue. We recommend upgrading from older versions as soon as possible.
Please see the What is MariaDB 5.3 page for an overview of MariaDB 5.3.
Sources, binaries, and package downloads are available from our network of MariaDB mirrors. Debian and Ubuntu packages are available from our mirrored apt repositories. We have a sources.list generator for creating sources.list entries.
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 5.1.62 and MariaDB 5.2.12. Both of these stable (GA) releases incorporate MySQL 5.1.62 and several bug fixes.
Most importantly, MariaDB 5.1.62 and 5.2.12 include a fix for a bug that under certain rare circumstances allowed a user to connect with an invalid password. This is a serious security issue. We recommend upgrading from older versions as soon as possible.
Please see the What is MariaDB 5.1 page for an overview of MariaDB 5.1, and the What is MariaDB 5.2 page for an overview of MariaDB 5.2.
Sources, binaries, and package downloads are available from our network of MariaDB mirrors. Debian and Ubuntu packages are available from our mirrored apt repositories. We have a sources.list generator for creating sources.list entries.