Re: [Maria-discuss] MySQL's future in Debian and Ubuntu

[Colin Charles]

Hi!

On 16 Feb 2012, at 07:57, Henrik Ingo wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Fabio T. Leitao
>  wrote:
>> For those who have not followed this up closely, a little history.
>> 
>> Remember that MariaDB is not just "compatible" with MySQL, but it kind of IS
>> MySQL, forked and re-branded.
>> 
>> In 2009, even before Oracle has purchased Sun, Monty Widenius (one of the
>> original creators of MySQL and architects) has left the Sun (than the owner
>> of MySQL) and started MariaDB, intended as a replacement for the full MySQL
>> server.
>> 
>> It seems that since that, most of the MySQL developers left and joined
>> either Drizzle or MariaDB. Drizzle is another fork, but was targeted to a
>> “limited but important market”, created by Brian Aker almost the same time
>> when MySQL was bought by Sun (back in 2008)
>> 
> 
> Hi Fabio
> 
> You contributed a fairly good history, so it inspired me to fill in
> missing pieces.
> 
> There is also a fourth MySQL fork: Percona Server. It is interesting
> to note people in this thread and in general the Linux distro people
> seem to omit this when talking about MySQL forks. As far as I'm aware
> it is the most popular of the forks (after MySQL itself), and used by
> many demanding Percona customers, especially the big and sexy Web
> companies (but not only).

I don't think this is a fair statement as MariaDB also has many popular users 
out there. Let's not make this a popularity contest either

> Out of these four it should first be mentioned that Drizzle is not at
> all a compatible fork of MySQL. Some would say the things that are not
> compatible are enhancements :-) But nevertheless, while Drizzle feels
> very familiar to a MySQL user, you couldn't take away MySQL, drop in
> Drizzle and expect that nobody would notice.

Nobody? WordPress users for example, might (see: 
https://launchpad.net/wordpress-drizzle a plugin that you will require). I 
think there's a Drupal patch that's almost quite ready also...

> Personally I think the main benefit of Percona Server is that they
> have a 5.5 version out there for some time - exactly a year ago it
> seems! While MariaDB has focused more on their own work (and perhaps
> also therefore the merge effort for them is much larger) they haven't
> yet produced a 5.5 release (even alpha). This should be taken into
> account, since many MySQL users already use MySQL 5.5 and features
> like semi-sync replication, they would consider MariaDB a downgrade.

MariaDB 5.5 beta should be out by the end of this month. It will not be GA in 
time for the LTS release, but it will be out soon (its worth noting that all 
these discussions is what has put the team to work on milestones in a quicker 
fashion). It will also include all enhancements up to MariaDB 5.3 naturally, so 
you get all the improvements that come with it

What should also be taken into consideration is support for an existing GA 
release. I've asked Percona (Stewart Smith, Director, Server Development) what 
the plans are and generally Percona will officially support 2 GA releases just 
like Oracle. Unless a customer asks for it, there wouldn't be a fix. LTS 
releases might I remind you need 5 years of support.  Percona Server 5.1 will 
remain supported till Percona Server 5.6 is released, and beyond that, its just 
a customer request possibly. There is no defined policy yet to be fair

> The other strong advantage Percona has at the moment is their recent
> adoption of Galera clustering technology (see Percona XtraDB Cluster).
> This is a revolutionary technology when it comes to High-Availability
> with MySQL and even scalability of MySQL. In fact it has many of the
> good properties seen in many NoSQL solutions (but is still good old
> SQL, Galera is just about the clustering). I'm personally a big fan of
> Galera and don't intend to use anything else going forward.

This alpha feature is very interesting, but the idea of having a 3-node cluster 
pitches this as a NDB replacement rather than just a MySQL replacement. But as 
an aside, I do agree with you - I am totally stoked with the Galera technology 
coming out of Codership!

cheers,
-c
--
Colin Charles, http://bytebot.net/blog/ | twitter: @bytebot | skype: 
colincharles
MariaDB: Community developed. Feature enhanced. Backward compatible.
Download it at: http://www.mariadb.org/
Open MariaDB/MySQL documentation at the Knowledgebase: http://kb.askmonty.org/


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Re: [Maria-discuss] MySQL's future in Debian and Ubuntu

[Colin Charles]

Hi!

On 15 Feb 2012, at 00:49, Marc Deslauriers wrote:

> We are unable to determine what the recent MySQL security fixes are due
> to lack of details, and unclear commit messages.

Based on our analysis of commits and bugs, we believe the CPU (critical patch 
update) that Oracle released was actually for a lot of bugs that have already 
been fixed in past versions of MySQL. They just seemed to have decided to "bulk 
it up" and place it in one update. Of course Oracle has not come up with an 
official statement and don't seem to be interested to do so. What is clear is 
that these bugs are not "new", and were not found from October 2011 - January 
2012. Of course we cannot be sure, but it would seem irresponsible of Oracle to 
state that the bugs referenced current community releases of MySQL (5.5.21, 
5.1.61 - eg. http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2012-0492). In 
fact the current GA is 5.5.20, and that advisory is listed as "high" in the CPU

>From a blog post by an Oracle employee that is now not online, the reference 
>to fixed bugs were:
1. Bug #11759688
2. Bug #52020
3. Bug #13358468
4. Bug #54082
5. Bug #11761576
6. Bug #51252
7. Bug #11758979
8. Bug #48726
9. Bug #11756764
10. Bug #42784
11. Bug #11751793
12. Bug #45546
13. Bug #11754011
14. Bug #13427949
15. Bug #11745230
16. Bug #12133
17. Bug #13116225
18. Bug #11759688
19. Bug #13358468
20. Bug #63020
21. Bug #13344643

Sadly, even in his reference, there are lots of bugs that are only kept in a 
closed bug system that Oracle has (basically anything with more than 5 digits 
in the bug number reference the closed bug system)

--
Colin Charles, http://bytebot.net/blog/ | twitter: @bytebot | skype: 
colincharles
MariaDB: Community developed. Feature enhanced. Backward compatible.
Download it at: http://www.mariadb.org/
Open MariaDB/MySQL documentation at the Knowledgebase: http://kb.askmonty.org/


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Re: [Maria-discuss] MySQL's future in Debian and Ubuntu

[Colin Charles]

Hi!

On 14 Feb 2012, at 20:28, Fabio T. Leitao wrote:

> Remember that MariaDB is not just "compatible" with MySQL, but it kind of IS 
> MySQL, forked and re-branded.

I like to say that it is MySQL, branched and re-branded with additional 
features. It is not a fork. We rebase with MySQL on a regular basis, so you get 
MySQL + all the additional features we've included

cheers,
-c
--
Colin Charles, http://bytebot.net/blog/ | twitter: @bytebot | skype: 
colincharles
MariaDB: Community developed. Feature enhanced. Backward compatible.
Download it at: http://www.mariadb.org/
Open MariaDB/MySQL documentation at the Knowledgebase: http://kb.askmonty.org/


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Re: [Maria-discuss] MySQL's future in Debian and Ubuntu

[Colin Charles]

Hi!

On 14 Feb 2012, at 00:11, Robbie Williamson wrote:

> One thing to note, the primary motivator for this proposal isn't about
> moving to a more "open source friendly" application.  We have genuine
> security concerns/issues with how MySQL handles and publishes their
> security updates.  We can't simply update supported prior Ubuntu
> releases to newer MySQL versions, so we have to backport patches.  Their
> lack of information and access to the bugs addressed makes it *very*
> time consuming and difficult for our security and SRU teams to do this.
> If we can resolve these issues, then MySQL's future in main looks much
> brighter.

As an addition to the lack of transparent security bugs, it should be noted 
that MySQL has an interesting release policy that may be incompatible with 
LTS-styled distributions. MySQL policy only aims to support 2 active GA 
releases at any one time.

In today's world, that is MySQL 5.1 and MySQL 5.5. If MySQL 5.6 becomes GA by 
April/June/October 2012 (as we suspect -- there is no roadmap/milestone), 
support will only exist for MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6. With an average of 12-18 
months in a release cycle for MySQL, this puts active support for MySQL 5.5 out 
by sometime in 2014. Ubuntu's next LTS release needs support for security till 
2017

Today, only MariaDB is giving you 5 years of community support for every GA 
release out there (from the date of the GA). i.e. if a bug is reported, and it 
is security related, it will be backported into older releases as long as they 
remain in active support. There is no trigger to have a paying customer have a 
bug, as long as the bug is currently in one of the many supported GA releases 
and reported on the very public Launchpad bug tracker :-)

cheers,
-c
--
Colin Charles, http://bytebot.net/blog/ | twitter: @bytebot | skype: 
colincharles
MariaDB: Community developed. Feature enhanced. Backward compatible.
Download it at: http://www.mariadb.org/
Open MariaDB/MySQL documentation at the Knowledgebase: http://kb.askmonty.org/


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Re: [debian-mysql] MySQL's future in Debian and Ubuntu

[Colin Charles]

Hi!

On 13 Feb 2012, at 15:20, Eddie Bachle wrote:

> As Linux gains more public recognition, more and more Windows-only 
> organizations will consider using it as an alternative, especially for their 
> web servers.   This is especially true because of the fact that each of the 
> necessarily main components of a web server exist in Linux in the same form 
> as the do on Windows and often run much better.  Then, the only piece one 
> would need to learn would be the new operating system, not the database, HTTP 
> server, or PHP scripting language software.   However, this is going to be a 
> more difficult proposition if the aforementioned advantage is somewhat 
> eliminated.  Were I to have to tell my boss that we could switch to Ubuntu 
> but it would mean that would need to use a "MySQL compatible" database if we 
> want to use the native database (which we likely would because it's tested to 
> be stable and it is supported by the developers), then she would be much more 
> hesitant.  

I reckon MySQL will always be available -- this discussion is about a supported 
release, especially from a security POV

> There simply is a much greater sense of trepidation for those who are not 
> significantly Linux savvy if there exists a possibility that they would have 
> to make something work in an unfamiliar environment, especially if it were to 
> happen unexpectedly.  If we ported our www website server over to Ubuntu and 
> then 6 months down the road we were to upgrade our Joomla version and there 
> became an issue with MariaDB because it lacks some MySQL feature that it 
> needs, or even that Joomla would fail to recognize Maria as being equivalent 
> to MySQL at some point, then that would be a huge detraction against 
> switching.  

More and more software out there also state it works with MariaDB. While your 
particular example of Joomla! doesn't, another popular CMS like Drupal has had 
MariaDB on its list for quite some time. (see: http://drupal.org/requirements 
-- "Recommended: MySQL (or an equivalent such as MariaDB)")

> Unless assurances that any software that asks for MySQL will recognize and 
> accept MariaDB equivalents, and that this should always be the case, and that 
> it will retain the stability and recognized benefits of MySQL, I would 
> encourage extreme caution in encouraging a switch.  Linux is beginning to 
> grow into areas it previously didn't reach and bringing a far 

I can totally understand your concern and assure you that MariaDB developers 
ensure compatibility and treat it as a very high requirement. Backwards 
compatible is one of our goals and we've never broken that. Extensive testing 
and QA helps too naturally

cheers,
-c

--
Colin Charles, http://bytebot.net/blog/ | twitter: @bytebot | skype: 
colincharles
MariaDB: Community developed. Feature enhanced. Backward compatible.
Download it at: http://www.mariadb.org/
Open MariaDB/MySQL documentation at the Knowledgebase: http://kb.askmonty.org/


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Re: Battery Warnings

[Ray Perigo]

@Jeremy - This is under Unity on 11.04, non-OEM install. I do have GNOME
Shell installed also, but I'm not sure how that could bork things.

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 10:33 AM, Oussama Bounaim wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm also affected by this i'm using ubuntu 10.04 and i have all the update
> installed, beside to that i have another problem my battery goes down
> faster than when i'm using windows.
>
> thanks
>
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 5:32 PM, Ray Perigo wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure I'd call this a bug, but can we do something about the
>> stacking of battery level warning dialogs? I find that if I leave my laptop
>> unattended for a while and the battery drains to the warning level, I've
>> got like half a dozen dialogs to click out of. The UI would be a bit
>> cleaner if it could be set up so that only one dialog at a time can be
>> opened by the battery monitor.
>>
>> Is this something that's even within the Ubuntu devs' sphere of control,
>> or is it somewhere upstream in Gnome?
>>
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>
>
> --
> Find me on Twitter @obounaim .
>
>
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