Quickly and efficiently migrating hundreds of servers from MySQL to MariaDB

Via SpamExperts:

SpamExperts has their own anti-spam filtering cloud which is provided as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. In addition they have an e-mail security product which they install, update and monitor on-site. Most of SpamExperts’ anti-spam technology has been developed in-house and makes extensive use of the MySQL database. All clients contribute in real-time to their filtering effectiveness, so they have many different data flows that are handled by MySQL. Replication is used to synchronize the data between the systems in a cluster and to push data feeds in real-time. The SaaS cloud is replicated across four countries for redundancy, whereas client installations spread the data retrieval around the globe.

After SQL-99, What’s Next?

As Hakan mentioned previously, the full text of SQL-99 Complete, Really by Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer, is now in the AskMonty.org Knowledgebase. Importing the text and formatting it for the Knowledgebase was a major project and I’m glad that it’s done.

Having the full text of this book freely available is a great thing for anyone who uses SQL because the book is about the SQL-99 standard and not about any particular database implementation. They do talk about different implementations, but those sections are clearly marked as such, and serve as examples of  how some databases implement (or diverge from) the standard.

SQL-99 Complete, Really

You can now enjoy  SQL-99 Complete, Really by Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer aka. “The Definitive Door Stopper” online in our Knowledgebase at http://kb.askmonty.org/v/sql-99-complete-really.

Thanks to our technical writer and system administrator at Monty Program Ab Daniel Bartholomew we now have a complete description of the SQL-99 standard for syntax, data structures, and retrieval processes of SQL databases. As an example-based reference manual it includes all of the CLI functions, information, schema tables, and status codes.

Please make sure to check out our commenting system. You can add your comments for every section of the book. …

Speaking at the MySQL User Conference 2011

New Year is coming! And it brings us a new MySQL User Conference! As always, me and my colleagues will be attending — we have great talks to offer:

  • Monty is giving a keynote State of MariaDB. Just like the last year, Monty will tell you how we are doing, what we have spent the last year on, what we are working on now.
  • Colin presents A Beginner’s Guide to MariaDB talk. If you have heard of MariaDB, but don’t quite know what it is and why you should care — go and attend his talk.

MariaDB Draft Trademark Policy Available

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in a post that Monty Program was working on a trademark policy for MariaDB, and we hoped to have something available for community review in early 2011.

Well, that draft is ready now. The draft is available in the MariaDB knowledgebase, and we are soliciting public feedback through January 2. During the first week of January any approved edits will be made to make a final version, and that final policy mirrored on mariadb.org and montyprogram.com.

Hopefully the intent of allowing the unhindered development of cool stuff related to MariaDB while protecting the value of the primary brand itself is made clear. …

MariaDB optimization for string related operations

In our upcoming MariaDB 5.3 release Monty optimized the internal string append code for performance. I tested his patch with a plain MariaDB 5.2 vs. a patched MariaDB 5.2 with sql-bench, which showed an overall performance gain around 3%.

The details of the patch Monty describes like this
Patch to optimize string append:

While examining a trace output from a mysql-test-run case, I noticed a
lot of reallocation calls.  This was strange as MariaDB/MySQL was
designed to do so few malloc/realloc as possible.  The system uses was
to first calculate how big buffer you would need and then allocate a
buffer big enough for most usage. …

MariaDB and TokuDB

I was happy to see the announcement yesterday from Tokutek regarding their addition of MariaDB to their list of supported platforms for the TokuDB storage engine.

One particular item in the press release caught my eye: “Our customers are choosing MariaDB more and more frequently for their most demanding database applications.” We’ve added many new features over the past year in our various 5.1 and 5.2 releases, but beyond the new goodies we’ve focused a lot of energy on removing bugs and improving performance. We’ve known for a while that MariaDB is the best version of MySQL out there; …

MariaDB 5.1.53 And 5.2.4 Released

This past Monday updates in both the 5.1 and 5.2 series of MariaDB were released. It’s a pretty big deal, as some issues have been solved that affect a large number of users. You should read the release notes for MariaDB 5.1.53 and for MariaDB 5.2.4 as well as the release announcement. The annoucement contains download links from worldwide mirrors.

Speaking of downloads, the 5.2 series has seen a remarkable increase in download totals. Several orders of magnitude, in fact. That’s usually a pretty good sign, so I’ll take it as such. …