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Media Blob Streaming getting a Google boost

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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.

A few words from Jonathan Schwartz

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Following Marten Mickos, the second opening keynote at the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo was by Jonathan Schwartz CEO and President of Sun Microsystems. Blog

His opening joke was about dinner with Marten, to which Marten said “You not going to get a keynote, unless you buy the company.”

So what was striking for me in his presentation “What is Sun’s Agenda?”

  • There is no open-source phone yet, but that’s an industry that needs disrupting.
  • Like the need for water or electricity, The Network Has Become A Social Utility.
  • We want to work with the community, create greater innovation.
  • The future, the price tag of Free, the philosophy of Freedom

I had a chance to meet Jonathan and Rich Green on Sunday night, and it was great to see Jonathan learning about, and getting behind the product PBXT – The Community Engine a MySQL 5.1 open source engine.

The pursuit of a synchronous world

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Well at least your MySQL database world.

As Paul eluded to, PrimeBase Technologies has a project to provide synchronous replication for MySQL in a High Availability environment. It is more then an idea, there is a plan.

Is it possible?
What are the use cases?
How can you use it?
Would you use it?

Some input to date. We need these questions and more, and we seeking more input for discussion.

Unfortunately the opportunity to hear any input during a presentation is left to the last day of the conference, so there has been created a BoF session on Tuesday night for a round table discussion if necessary. People are encouraged to bring specific cases and situations for feedback, the reasons why MySQL Replication, MySQL Cluster, DRBD/HeatBeat or any other solution does not satisfy your needs, and what would.

If you can’t wait you may need to seek out Booth #518, and make a time to seek out the Technology Expert.

Just today, Peter Zaitsev of MySQL Performance Blog also writes in State of MySQL Market and will Replication live ?, “Customers are constantly asking me if there is something which would help them to scale MySQL and get some HA out of the box even on the medium level. Seriously – MySQL Cluster, Continuent, Master-Master Replication, DRBD or SAN based HA architectures all have their limits which makes neither of them used for very wide class of applications.” to confirm this pursuit.

Storage Engines at the MySQL Conference

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I’ll be following closely the progression of Storage Engines available in the MySQL Database server, well soon to be available when 5.1 gets to GA (hopefully by end of Q2 which is what we have been told). Tick, Tick, time is running out.

PrimeBase XT (PBXT) and Blob Streaming is a focus as PrimeBase Technologies, the company which I want to note for people is an Open Source company, committed at providing an open source alternative to the other commercial players. You also have at the MySQL Conference talks on the the existing InnoDB from Innobase (a subsidiary of market RDBMS leader Oracle). There is a Nitro presentation, an Infobright presentation, no Solid presentation surprisingly (the IBM news happening after submissions closed). We also have from MySQL, presentations on the internally developed storage engines Falcon and Maria, both products that won’t even be in 5.1 but 6.0, however Maria is presently a different branch of 5.1 so I don’t know how that works. Will it be in 5.1?

But what I want to seek is more news of KickFire, a Diamond Sponsor, an engine with embedded H/W, something that’s been obviously worked on in reasonable stealth. For me it’s not just interesting, it’s a competitor in our technology space, so I’ve been researching Joseph Chamdani and some of his patents.

Plenty of news in the past few weeks on Kickfire including Kickfire Update by Keith Murphy on April 3, Kickfire: stream-processing SQL queries by Baron Schwartz on April 4, Kickfire looking to push MySQL limits by Farhan Mashraqi on April 4, and Kickfire Kickfire Kickfire by Peter Zaitsev on April 4, and myself back on March 23.

So what can I make from the lack of company information and posted information to date.

  • Hardware based acceleration.
  • No Solid State Drive (SSD) Technology, at least not yet but C2App mentions SSD.
  • Data Warehousing, lending to thinking it’s not a transactional storage engine
  • A new storage engine and a new approach to data storage. I find this surprising, as it takes years to develop a feature complete storage engine, and most new 5.1 storage engines are indeed existing products, take Nitro, Solid, Infobright and Falcon. Only PBXT has been written from the ground up for MySQL 5.1, so looking to know more about it’s development
  • Expensive, it’s dedicated H/W + (assuming) MySQL Enterprise + Storage Engine

Come and get a t-shirt at UC2008

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Here I am at my desk sporting the PrimeBase supporters t-shirt that will be available at the exhibitors booth at the 2008 MySQL Conference. The front is rather uneventful with the official logo, but the back will be worth the experience. So everybody interested in supporting PBXT as the transactional storage engine for MySQL developed by the community and for the community, please come and see us and mention the secret password.

We have been placed way back in the right hand side of the exhibitors hall at booth 518, in front of the Open Source and OEM providers.

A day with Paul McCullagh – Architect of PBXT and BlobStreaming

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Continuing on from my lightning visits with Jan Kneschke and Michael Zinner, today I got to spend a day with Paul McCullagh at his home in Hamburg Germany.


Paul is the architect of the PBXT Pluggable Storage Engine for MySQL 5.1, and also the Blob Streaming Storage Engine. His work was acknowledged with the MySQL Community contributor for the year in 2007. The successful PrimeBase product for the publishing Industry in Europe and North America also now uses PBXT for underlying data storage which is great to see a company use it’s own products.

Like each friend and expert this week, Paul develops using Mac, but at least uses the US English version & keyboard layout, not the German layout. As Paul states, “the German version is not productive for coding”.

Paul uses NetNewsWire Lite as his RSS feeder, as I observe some PlanetMySQL links. I’m more old school, I just go to the site every few days. I really should move from the dark ages, one advantage is the RSS feeder shows you what you have read.

However, there is a particular reason why I visited Paul, other then to spend some time with a good friend. I’m doing more investigation regarding making coding changes to MySQL, and I’m very out of the development cycle. I’ve forgotten more then I remember with C++ and in particular the tools and techniques used to develop, debug and deploy. Of course I know what I need to do, I just need to know what now is the most efficient means of doing today.

Paul uses Xcode to view and edit his MySQL code. The development environment provided by Apple is good for Java and C++. As an Eclipse person from my Java days, I was using CDT for my C++ environment. XCode is used for project management (i.e. looking at files in project) and for file editing. A standard terminal is used to do make. Xcode can do a quick compile for syntax checking and you get a list of errors and hot links to lines of code.

The next key part is debugging, and you can very easily define executables and enable you to run in an integrated debugger. A good option testing is to run mysql test with is –manual-gdb. This gives you the command you can run. What Paul does it copy the parameters, and add to an executable defined within XCode, the arguments from the –manual-gdb output.

The MySQL source tree was added as a project but only partial source directories such as (storage,sql,include) are required. You do need to make sure it does compile (but necessary for a build via Xcode.)

Additional debugging help is In xcode you can do jump to variable definition. So you can add breakpoints, and then run the defined executable that was build via command line make, and copy mysqld binary to initially deployed directory.

Regarding testing, we got to talk again about the issues with the MySQL Test Suite including the issues I encountered while working with Nitro. Hard coded storage engine syntax such as such as engine type=Innodb make testing more complicated then necessary. MySQL test requires some modifications for pluggable storage engines. You need to add a row to the plugins table via mysql_system_tables_data.sql to enable –default-storage-engine=pbxt as a command line argument. Paul did state that on using the MySQL testing suite, the Perl version is a great improvement in performance.

So now I understand the environment, I get onto my problem, and we are specifically looking at the thread sort_buffer and sql/filesort.cc

So when I ask about a few lines of specific code, Paul shakes his head, and says “This looks crazy”. After we spend some time on it, his comment is upgraded, “this doesn’t look crazy, it is crazy. When you look at the effect of the code, it appears it can be done in 3 lines, and it would make sense what it is doing.” This is worth further discussion in a future post.

One last tip learned. You need to be careful with multiple versions and open projects of the same, not to make changes 1/2 in one version and 1/2 in another version.

Just what are MySQL 9.x features?

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Top marks to Jay Pipes for getting the Forge 2.0 finally out after quite some time, as well as in the midst of the MySQL Conference he is organizing.

I am worried however about some of the content, as shown in the screenshot below, the opening page lists Worklog tasks/features for versions 6.x or 7.x , that’s ok, but features in 9.x. Where is the practicality of thinking more then 2 releases ahead, and just having a future bucket. Indeed, we have 5.1 and 6.0 already frozen and not releases, so 6.x is already 3 releases out.

Tonight we were told at the NY PHP Meeting MySQL 5.1 is not due to late Q2, so that’s at least June 2008.
The MySQL 5.1 Release Notes reveals a history that I don’t find very flattering.

  • MySQL 5.1.3 (29 November 2005)
  • MySQL 5.1.9 (12 April 2006) *First reported beta via docs
  • MySQL 5.1.22 (24 September 2007: Release Candidate)

I hope that Sun will take on board this very slow release cycle of producing GA products, the last version MySQL 5.0.15 (19 October 2005: Production) 2 years and 6 months ago.

I’m even more interested then previously in the ultimate release and success of MySQL 5.1 as this is a pre-requisite of my new employer’s key product the PBXT Storage Engine for MySQL.

Companies speaking at UC2008

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The Conference Speakers of the 2008 MySQL Conference provides some common and interesting names of companies not common in MySQL circles such as eBay, Microsoft Corporation, HP, Symantec. I see speakers outside of MySQL from countries including USA, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Japan and Australia.

I did some data analysis of the speakers list. There are 150 speakers, there are 45 from MySQL. Other companies with multiple speakers include Sun Microsystems, Kickfire, Linbit, Cafepress, Open Query, Proven Scaling, Standford Linear Accelerate Center, UC Berkeley, Siz Apart, The Hive, Zmanda, MySQL Performance Blog, Infobright, Digg, Grazr and of course PrimeBase Technologies.

Only two MySQL speakers have listed “MySQL/Sun” the rest are “MySQL”. I wonder what the policy is here? You have “Oracle / Innobase” and “Innobase / Oracle Corp.” some identity crisis there, the guys from “MySQL Performance Blog” prefer this name over the company name “Percona”, obviously for brand exposure. You have “Grazr Corporation” and “Grazr Inc”. It’s only trivia but interesting.

Upcoming 2008 MySQL Conference

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It’s just three weeks now before the 2008 MySQL Conference. Good to see my mug shot on the front page (see screen shot below).

I will still be presenting my session Top 20 DB Design Tips Every Architect Needs to Know, however as a departing MySQL Employee I’ve had to give up the chance to present the “MySQL for Oracle DBA’s Bootcamp” tutorial, content that I developed for MySQL specifically and have already presented three one day seminars in New York, San Francisco and Washington DC.
Update March 26 2008. I should clarify that I notified MySQL as part of my exit items that I would not be able to present the Tutorial. I would very much like to, and being the author of the content I am well qualified, however as this was developed for MySQL and will be again used by MySQL in the future I felt it was inappropriate that a non MySQL employee and a recent departed employee was presenting this content. I did not want for any attendees to be confused or see a potential conflict of interest and I wanted to ensure I kept my distance from the strict Sun Intellectual Policy procedures.

Kickfire formally C2 App a Diamond sponsor will be something I’m very interested in seeing, MySQL being written specifically in hardware. A few talks I’ll be interested in seeing include Securing MySQL for a Security Audit by Brian Miezejewski, Disaster is Inevitable—Are You Prepared? by Farhan Mashraqi, Developing Information Schema plugins by Mark Leith, Astronomy, Petabytes and MySQL and System Techniques to Remove I/O Bottlenecks in Large Query Intensive Applications.

What impact will Sun Microsystems a Platinum sponsor and acquirer of MySQL have at the conference? CEO Johnathan Schwartz will be following former CEO Marten Mickos’ open keynote with Open Source: The Heart of the Network Economy. There are a number of Sun related talks and Sun employees speaking. I’m sure attendance numbers of Sun employees will be up also.

PrimeBase Technologies will be out in force at the Exhibitors hall, so be sure to stop by and say hello, and get a free t-shirt from them.

My passion for Open Source

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I am a very strong proponent of Open Source (excluding my Macbook). Joining MySQL Inc was a wonderful achievement, being part of the team behind the most popular open source database. Leaving MySQL was not an easy decision due to the people, but the Sun transition and requirements did help. However it is no surprise I am joining another open source company – Primebase Technologies in Hamburg, Germany. My association with the MySQL Community will only be strengthened with my full work and support behind the PBXT and Blob Streaming pluggable storage engines for MySQL.

It is actually poetic that I am joing Primebase for I have the auspicious recognition while an active part of the MySQL community of introducing Paul McCullagh to MySQL some 2 years ago. Only weeks later, PBXT was MySQL news in the opening CEO keynote my Marten Mickos at the 2006 MySQL Users Conference.

I expect this opportunity will increase my contributions, in particular in the lacking areas of instrumentation and memory management. As well I will now be focusing my efforts on MySQL 5.1 and ensuring this is of the highest quality for the MySQL Community. While my open source code contributions have been small to date, my first some years ago adding in JMeter support for MySQL Stored procedures and Transactions, the feeling of seeding instead of leaching is a wonderful thing. I look forward to a greater opportunity with the team at Primebase Technologies.