MySQL conference first session

April 15, 2008

I just got here a few minutes ago and am sitting in in the ‘Future of MySQL’ with Robin Schumacher and Rob Young. Interesting - 5.1.24 RC announced at the conference yesterday. GA scheduled for end of Q2 - 2008. It’s close.

Some nice new things - job scheduling, row-based/hybrid replication, faster full-text search, better “problem SQL” identification, better table/index partitioning. However, as with everything with MySQL, there’s always some catches. With the partitioning, for example, it’s not parallel, nor does it support indexes yet. I hope I heard that wrong, but I don’t think I did (I’m recording it as well).

The Falcon engine is available in MySQL 6.0 alpha, scheduled for the end of 2008. What I’m hearing is that the first Falcon engine betas are now being tuned for performance. The chart I’m seeing is that for many tasks Falcon is 30-50% faster than InnoDB at higher concurrency. Low concurrency (8-16 connections) InnoDB is a bit better. Higher concurrency Falcon is much better.

MySQL 6.0 will have a better backup solution, except there will be no support for clustering. Clustering support has its own backup tool, so there wasn’t a major issue to roll out day one. Apparently the MySQL 6.0 backup will be SQL driven, and was inspired somewhat by MSSQL. “Logical based” backup - it’s writing the insert commands directly, but will be faster than mysqldump. Restore is reportedly much better too.

Power just fluttered and we lost the mic and projector for a bit. Having this happen right during a backup/restore section was priceless.

Restore is a ‘blocking’ restore, so it’ll stop whatever you’re doing. Backup commands will be non-blocking on transactional engines (innodb, falcon) - backup on myisam will still block. Plugins coming for non-blocking myisam native backup. Other features (or plugins?) will be encryption and compression for backups ‘on the fly’. Idea is that it’ll use much less disk space.

Massive improvement in optimizations in 6.0. A MySQL 5.0 query that took 12 minutes now is 1.8 seconds. No word on whether that was Falcon engine or not.

Replication for clusters? Interesting in 5.1.

There was some mention of bundling memcached in to MySQL, but I may have misheard that. Woud be cool if so. Looks like a q2 thing.

MySQL workbench - I missed the demo of this, but it’s being reported here as massively upgraded. I hope so - it’s basically been broken for a long time (at least, my experiences under Linux were). Hopefully that’s better now.

Talking about zmanda.com backup tool now.

New engine type - Maria - MyISAM with crash recovery. Slated for 6.0.

This seems to jive up somewhat with Jay Pipes mentioned to me in January at Codemash. Some “optimizer enhancements” are slated in the next year or so, but Jay had said it’d likely be 2010 before there’s massive attention paid to it. Bit of a shame, but it looks like some optimizer changes are hitting some relatively low hanging fruit already.

“Citadel” - dynamic encryption without functions, better security, data auditing (who changed what, etc?). I’ve been wondering for years why SQL databases don’t have an option to log all database changes in to shadow tables. Many people end up writing trigger for that functionality anyway. Doesn’t sound like this Citadel release (next version after 6.0) will have that level of logging, but it’d be cool if it did.