This was nice to see all the MySQL ecosystem in the same very crowded room :
Oracle, Percona, MariaDB, SkySQL. We definitely need this kind of open event. MySQL Connect (owned by Oracle) or Percona Live (owned by Percona) are 2 great events but they do not gather the same variety of speakers and attendees. Thanks to the FOSDEM MySQL Dev room review committee the agenda reflected this openness.
The "MySQL and friends dev room" was crowded which was for me a surprise as I expected most people to be at NoSQL or Cloud topics rooms ;-). This reflect the strong attraction of MySQL with its constant innovation momentum. The challenge for presenters was the short 30 mns format. This has a big advantage that speakers have to get rid of marketing bullshit and concentrate on key points.
Collin Charles gave a pres on MHA solution. It nice to hear that it is a very active project. It is a proven technology used at Facebook. It allows very versatile usage from a manual switch-over to fully automatic failover. It can be combine with a clusterware like pacemaker. This is a technology we fully support at SkySQL and that we have deployed successfully at many customers.
Peter Boros gave a very interesting talk on an ongoing project at the Groupon company. The solution address the automatic warmup of a slave server during binlog apply. it is mix of a tool that read and stream the slow query log with the percona playback tool to warmup slave. I definitely would like to know more. I really like when people address an old problem with a new creative approach. The part streaming the slow query log should be open sourced soon.
Lars Thalmann presented a full picture of Oracle innovation around MySQL. There was a nice question about why Oracle which has released a migration toolkit does not address Oracle migration. Lars was surprised too 🙂 But I think it is fair to leave this part be developed by the community ;-). Lars presented all the progress made around windows platform. They are impressive. This is a good point as Windows remain important as the entry point for adoption, development and testing.
Luis Soares who manage the replication at Oracle described in detailed the new features of 5.6. He gave a workaround on how to implement multi master replication.
MariaDB will offer natively this feature (Thanks to TAOBAO contribution).
Stephane Combaudon had the task to chose the 5 tools he considered the most useful in the percona toolkit. The nominees were :
pt-query-digest, pt-online-schema-change, pt-table-checksum, pt-stalk, pt-archiver
Stephan insisted on the fact that it is really important to understand how the tools work to avoid damaging mistakes. This is in particular true for pt-archiver which is a nice tool to purge old data in MySQL.
Maciej Dobzranski gave a talk on MySQL and security. Tis subject is a hot one. The key take away is "MySQL is not secure out of the box! Many users just leave it at that.". A lot of tips and valuable examples of security challenges faced with MySQL.
When I read the schedule I saw there was no pause for lunch for the MySQL Dev Room ! Unacceptable for a french guy 😉 ! I saw Justin Swanhart pres title "Divide and conquer in the cloud" I thought I might use this slot to go as I expected classic marketing about how the cloud is going to save our life. I bought my sandwich and run back to the MySQL Dev Room as I wanted to have for my money (kidding : FOSDEM is free with no need for registration 😉 and the beer is cheap).
Justin Swanhart was presenting "Shard-Query" which is a framework that add parallelism and improve query performance based on SQL language constructs. This is a great tool. Some nice ideas mentioned like using Shard-Key-Mapper in conjunction with mysqlnd plugins (PHP connector) . Justin gave example of query speedup for a SUM aggregate. He mention that MEAN and STDDEV were not candidate to parallelization. I think it can be parallelized in a multi pass approach. I will blog on it later.
Other interesting pres by Andrew Morgan, Sveta Smirnova, Oystein Grovlen, Giuseppe Maxia, Henrik Ingo, Raghavendra Prabhu.
I am sure that next year FOSDEM MySQL Dev Room will have more people as this is a really great event. MySQL remain a hot topic with a lot of innovation to come.
FOSDEM is definitely the right place for all the MySQL community to gather !