I’m excited to be here not only to catch up with old friends and ex-colleagues, but also to witness what seems to be the start of a very significant conference from MySQL.
I really enjoyed the introductions done by Edward Screven and Thomas Ulin. Edward highlighted the fact that MySQL is increasing its presence in the market and in the community. This could be thanks to the unbelievable effort done by Oracle in keeping its production cycle on target. Thomas stressed that point and gave a great description of it. He demonstrated Oracle’s main focus points, which are mainly on InnoDB, with implementation and enhancement of the internal contentions, then on Optimizer improvements and NoSQL integration.
Replication remains a pending issue from my side because if we have the global transaction ID, we still suffer from delay in replication given that parallel replication is still working by, schema and not transaction. So yes, there is improvement as announced and expected, but it’s still far from a healthy and efficient state of art.
What I found interesting here are a couple of additional announcement, which did not seem to be so relevant, but the facts are crucial for few customers. Audit interface was one of the key missing feature in the past. The API might have been there in 5.5 but not as a ready-to-go product. Also, security enforcement was not so efficient, but in 5.6, it was redesigned and much more effective.
Then there was something that brought me back to 5 years ago: the return of DRBD. I have being working with it for a long time. I was using it on several customers, but my customers and I were unhappy with this approach of Primary/Secondary where the Secondary was mainly a full set of completely useless hardware.
There was the DRBD solution to solve it, but I have never seen it efficiently in place. I am also unsure of the usage of Peacemaker, which adds so much complexity to a HA solution that could make working under pressure and emergency a real nightmare.
Information about the new MySQL utilities is more than fascinating. Looking into it is a must! We have to pay particular attention to a few packages like the MySQL Migration tool. When I did the Oracle to MySQL migration at the United Nations in 2006, I had the chance to work on it and to do a lot of expansion to the code itself. In that context, it was working great, and it was a shame that the product remained as is without further improvement. Having it revive is great. I just hope that the possibility of improving and customizing the tool as I did in 2006 will remain.
My feeling is that this will be an amazing conference, really focused on what customer need. I feel like I am in a privileged position, given that by working at Pythian I am aware of customer issues, different approaches, and causalities that no one else have. This together with our experience and knowledge in other technology gives us all the real freedom to be objective in choosing the right tool for the job in relation to customer needs.
I am thrilled and ready to go through as many sessions as I can!
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