Newsletter: June 2009

News Items:

• Open Database Alliance, MariaDB
• Percona Keeps Growing
• Percona Performance Conference
• Percona Enhancements to the MySQL Server
• Percona XtraDB and Percona XtraBackup
• MMM Improvements
• Cacti Improvements
• Maatkit
• A Tool To Make Upgrades Safer

Open Database Alliance, MariaDB

Together with Monty Widenius, the creator of MySQL(R), we've founded the Open Database Alliance to create a secure, open, and free home for the MySQL(R) Database Server. MySQL is a trademarked name, so the new server is called MariaDB. In a nutshell, MariaDB is a branch of the MySQL database server that's backwards compatible. It is intended to have additional features and expected to have better performance for many types of workloads.

Monty and many core MySQL developers, whom he's hired, are picking the project up and moving it forward. And in our partnership with Monty, we can create great results. You can retain Monty's services directly through us -- no new contract or paperwork is required. It is basically invisible for you, and we remain responsible and involved in the results, ensuring quality of service as usual. If you want a feature, now there is someone you can hire who'll actually make it happen. As one example of an oft-requested but never-implemented feature that someone could sponsor, how about LDAP authentication?

Lots of other companies are in the process of joining. Together we are stronger, and as a result, so are you!

Although not a lot of people are using MariaDB yet, it is just the existing MySQL code plus some improvements, so it should be stable, fast, and ready for general use. Some of the performance improvements look very significant, especially for GROUP BY and ORDER BY queries and the like. We are mincing our words here because we never want to tout something that we haven't battle-tested, and it's clearly a new project even though the code is derived from the same source.

http://opendatabasealliance.com/
http://askmonty.org/
http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB

Percona Keeps Growing

We're hiring a handful of top consultants, and we're continuing to improve things like our pricing and group work structures. Every time we find something that doesn't quite mesh with customer needs, we try to find a better way to do it. Again, your positive and negative feedback is very welcome. We are spending a lot of time trying to find better ways to work with customers and meet their needs, so hints and tips are great!

Percona Performance Conference

We organized a free, purely technical conference about performance (not just about MySQL) alongside the 2009 MySQL(R) Conference and Expo in April. It was a huge success. We had a packed roster of great speakers, from 8:30 AM until 10:30 PM for two days in a row, with short sessions and no breaks between talks. The room was standing-room-only pretty much the whole time, and it held 300
people! Slides are online now at the link below.

http://www.percona.com/live/santa-clara-2009/

Percona Enhancements to the MySQL Server

Vadim, Yasufumi and crew keep bringing out improvements, and so do our friends at Google. We've solved a lot of scalability and performance problems, such as group commit and adaptive checkpointing. And transactional replication and more profiling and measurement improvements are forthcoming. Everything is developed in a truly open-source fashion, with public mailing lists, bug trackers, and source code. We are also working on getting these changes into MariaDB.

Many of the features are requested and sponsored by customers. You can get your favorite feature or bug fix in your favorite version of the server, too. Just ask your consultant!

http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/release:start

Percona XtraDB and Percona XtraBackup

We and our customers were increasingly hitting performance, scalability and functionality limitations with the InnoDB(R) storage engine, so we decided to produce a faster, better storage engine that meets critical real-world needs for our customers. The result is XtraDB. If InnoDB's limitations are hurting you, XtraDB might help.

Features currently in progress include the ability to move .ibd files between installations (export a file from one server and import to another). Again, this is a customer-sponsored feature.

https://launchpad.net/percona-xtradb

XtraBackup is our open-source backup tool for InnoDB and XtraDB tables. It provides fast, non-blocking, incremental backup. You can see it as an open-source version of InnoDB Hot Backup, but it's actually much more than that. It has a lot of features and functionality that InnoDB's tool doesn't have. It's also fully GPL, so we are able to link with other GPL code to give it a "native look and feel" that's very similar to the MySQL command-line tools. The motivation for this project was some LVM benchmarks we ran, which proved that LVM snapshots have unacceptable performance. Since we started the project, customers have sponsored quite a bit of additional development.

If you're currently taking backups through mysqldump, LVM snapshots, or InnoDB Hot Backup, you should take a look at it. We consider it production-ready, and lots of customers are already using it.

https://launchpad.net/percona-xtrabackup

MMM Improvements

The Master-Master-Manager project, commonly known as MMM, is a toolset for high-availability MySQL clusters through master-master replication and IP takeover. Percona has stepped up to maintain and improve it. Our senior consultant Maciek Dobrzanski upgraded it to the 1.2.x series over the last few months, which was a customer-sponsored effort. It now has many new features and fixes, and lots of our customers are using it in production. If you're not upgraded, we highly recommend it. The old version 1.1 contains a lot of serious bugs.

More people are also getting involved with the project and taking an active role in it. One of them has written a version 2.0, but no one (not even the author) has tried to run it in production as far as we know. As the project gains momentum, we hope that will change.

http://code.google.com/p/mysql-master-master/

Cacti Improvements

Percona engineers have contributed to a new release of the Cacti graphing templates for MySQL, Apache, Nginx, Memcached performance monitoring. These are much better than anything else I've seen; they're well worth upgrading to if you already have the teMySQL templates or similar.

http://code.google.com/p/mysql-cacti-templates/

Maatkit

Maatkit is a widely used suite of tools for MySQL administration that was created by Baron Schwartz several years ago. Percona has invested heavily in the development for the last year. Maatkit releases happen every month, so it's not really news to say there's a new version. What IS new is that Percona has hired a fulltime developer, Daniel Nichter, for the project. The pace of development will increase as a result.

Notable things in Maatkit recently include large changes to command-line options (ongoing -- check your wrapper scripts after an upgrade) and more capabilities in mk-query-digest. All of this is being done in a purely open-source fashion, with all decisions taking place on the mailing list.

One feature we built a few months ago, and which is turning out to be very useful indeed, is automatic slow-log analysis. In a nutshell, you use
logrotate's postrotate section with mk-query-digest's --review option to get an email whenever a new kind of query shows up in your slow log. No need to do it manually; no need to waste time looking at things you've already looked at; and faster reaction time after something changes. Let us know if this sounds interesting. It's fully documented, but of course we are ready to help you set it up.

http://code.google.com/p/maatkit

A Tool To Make Upgrades Safer

We've seen increasing numbers of production deployments of MySQL 5.1, and quite a few customers are looking into upgrading. We see a great need for something to help with these upgrades, and I'd like you to consider contributing to our effort.

In a nutshell, MySQL 5.1 can often have different query plans for the same query, and it's not always good. Sometimes it'll refuse to use an index that it should. Upgrading can be made a lot safer if we can build a tool to help evaluate changes in the execution plan of your workload on 5.1. We've done a little thinking about how to do this as a Maatkit tool. Some notable people, such as Google's Mark Callaghan, have chimed in. Mark can contribute tremendous expertise as a mentor. But we still need to write the code.

This isn't just about upgrading to 5.1, it is any change in server version. We know a lot of you are still on 4.1 or even 4.0 or earlier, and thinking about bumping it up a version. The tool can help there, too. It's also useful for things like evaluating a change in performance if you switch storage engines or change server settings. What we've been talking about is quite a bit more sophisticated than a simple benchmark.

If a handful of you will join together and sponsor a few hours each, we think it will go a long ways towards building the tool. Here are two URLs you should read to learn more:

http://tinyurl.com/og4lcv
http://code.google.com/p/maatkit/issues/detail?id=422

Thanks for considering it.

MySQL is a registered trademark of MySQL AB in the United States, the European Union and other countries. InnoDB is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. Percona is an independent company, and not affiliated with either Sun or Oracle. All software modified and distributed in accord with the GPL v2 license.