Databases

Since I found no Serendipity plugin for the vote feature on Planet MySQL, I took Diego Medina's JavaScript code and added it to the Serendipity default template. Here is the patch against Serendipity 1.5.5, which should be easy to adjust for other templates as well. Maybe I will find time to implement it as a regular Serendipity plugin sometime in the future...

The vote buttons are getting displayed only when viewing a single blog entry, not in the RSS feed and not in the article overview, and only if the entry is in the MySQL category. Your blog has to be on Planet MySQL already, and your readers need to have an account on the MySQL website to vote.

MySQL supports a plugin interface since 5.1, which enables creation of server components. Plugins can be loaded at server startup, or loaded and unloaded at runtime without restarting the server. Most of these plugins require the full MySQL source tree during their build, which was not available in Debian as a binary package until I uploaded 5.1.54-2 to unstable last week. I had this item on my TODO list since MySQL 5.1 was uploaded to Debian unstable, because it is not possible for a Debian source package to build-depend on another source package. Thankfully, Clint Byrum from Ubuntu sent me a small patch which added the new binary package.

The first package making use of the new mysql-source-5.1 package is HandlerSocket, a NoSQL plugin for MySQL. It is currently waiting in Debian's NEW queue for approval, and I am sure we will see more plugins/packages (XtraBackup from Percona is another well known candidate) making use of the new binary package in Debian soon.

Since MySQL 5.5 was declared stable in December last year, I regulary receive e-mails from people asking when it will get uploaded to Debian. The good thing is that the initial conversion from automake to cmake has already been done by Clint Byrum from Ubuntu, and we are going to use his work as a basis for our packages. The not so good thing is bug #59078, an issue in libmysqlclient which breaks ABI compatibility. According to Lenz Grimmer from Oracle the MySQL upstream developers are already looking at it.

I am still not sure if it is a good idea to upload MySQL 5.5 in the current state to experimental, but I am definitely not going to upload it to unstable until this issue is fixed.

Update: I just had a conversation with Matthew Montgomery from Oracle, who told me that the SONAME of libmysqlclient will get bumped in 5.5.10, which is going to fix the problem.

Last month I spent two days in Belgium, after I got invited to the MySQL distro meeting. It was a non-public meeting with some people from Sun Microsystems and MySQL maintainers from different Linux distributions. It took place directly after FOSDEM (which I unfortunately could not attend due to personal reasons) at the Sun Microsystems Belgium office in Brussels. It was great to meet with Mathias Gug from the Ubuntu Server team in person. He had some really good ideas on how we could reduce the differences between MySQL in Debian and Ubuntu in the future. As a consequence, Debian will soon switch from Subversion to Bazaar for maintenance of most MySQL packages.

However, we were not only talking about the MySQL Server itself, but also about MySQL Cluster, MySQL Proxy, the MySQL Connectors and the MySQL GUI Tools. Giuseppe Maxia has a more detailed blog entry about the event, including the whole list of participants and some pictures. I fully agree with him: The meeting was a success, we also had a lot of fun, and we should do that more often!

Thanks a lot to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring, and of course to Lenz Grimmer for organizing the event.

Update: Forgot to link to the slides of the talk about MySQL in Debian that I have given at the event.

Due to a bug in britney, the Debian testing migration tool, MySQL is currently not available in testing. The issue is known and being worked on already, and it is documented in the Debian bug tracking system.

Update: Meanwhile the issue was fixed, MySQL is available in testing again.

MySQL 5.1 was uploaded to Debian unstable, and until we get it into testing, I am providing semi-official up-to-date backports of MySQL 5.1.36 and 5.0.84 for i386 and amd64 in my home directory on people.debian.org. I am providing MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 4.0 and 5.0, and MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 5.0. If you need MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 4.0 as well, please let me know.

MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 4.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.0/ etch-backports main


MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 5.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.0/ lenny-backports main

MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 5.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.1/ lenny-backports main

When MySQL 5.1.36 (or newer) made it into testing, I am going to move the MySQL 5.1 backport to backports.org, where it belongs. MySQL 5.0 will then completely disappear from the development branches of Debian.

Beware that the MySQL 5.1 packages do not include MySQL Cluster support, it was dropped from MySQL 5.1 a while ago, and is now available as a separate product. Unfortunately MySQL Cluster is not yet available in Debian, packaging it is one of the big items on my TODO list.

Thanks to Christian Hammers, we finally have MySQL 5.1 in Debian unstable, which completely replaces MySQL 5.0. Please update all build-dependencies from libmysqlclient15-dev to libmysqlclient-dev and upload a rebuild version of your package.

As a positive side-effect, we no longer care about MySQL bug #41728, which was the reason why no newer version of MySQL 5.0 made it into testing since lenny got released.

During the last few months I was the only person working on the MySQL packages in Debian, and I could really need some help. Currently there is MySQL 5.0.32 in etch, 5.0.51a in lenny, 5.0.75 in unstable and 5.1.31 in experimental, and I am also trying to get MySQL Cluster and MySQL Workbench into Debian. All in all it is way too much work for only one developer.

If you are an interested Debian developer/maintainer with a good knowledge in MySQL and shared library packaging, drop me a mail.

Based on the official Ubuntu 8.04 package from Sun (thanks to Alfredo Kojima) I prepared a package of MySQL Workbench 5.1.7 for Debian. I am going to upload it to experimental soon, in the meanwhile it is available (amd64 only) from here:

http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-workbench/

Feedback appreciated!

The MySQL packages in Debian still do not (and will never) include inofficial feature patches (beside the redirect output of error.log to syslog in MySQL 5.0, which is now part of the official MySQL 5.1 releases) like the ones from Percona or Google. Of course we add important bugfixes from newer (not yet released) versions of MySQL, but no feature patches.

If you are interested in a patched version of the Debian MySQL packages, take a look at OurDelta, their builds include patches (complete list) like mirrored binlog and InnoDB freeze. Upgrading from the official Debian packages of MySQL to the builds from OurDelta should work without problems, but please use Launchpad when reporting bugs against their packages, and not the Debian Bug Tracking System.

This week MySQL released version 5.0.75 of their Community Edition. The package in testing is in good shape, so I had time to prepare and upload 5.0.75-1 to unstable, but it should work on testing as well. I also made a rebuild for etch, which is available here.

In the next upload of MySQL 5.1.30 to the experimental branch of Debian we are going to drop MySQL Cluster support from the standard MySQL packages. I already wrote something about the future of MySQL Cluster in Debian a while ago, this is just the first step towards a separate mysql-cluster package in Debian.

This change does not (and will never) affect the MySQL packages in etch and lenny, and unstable not until we decide to move MySQL 5.1 from experimental to unstable.

Yesterday I visited the MySQL Customer Conference in Munich, as I did last year. The agenda was quite similar to last year's agenda, but I was really surprised how much Sun hardware and software products were integrated (forced?) into most of the not so technical talks.

All in all the conference was okay, but not as good as last year.

This morning I finally found some time to add an init script to the Debian package of mysql-proxy (0.6.1-3 which includes it was just uploaded to unstable, I will try to get a freeze exception for lenny). It is disabled by default, because mysql-proxy is quite useless without a proper configuration. It can be enabled in /etc/default/mysql-proxy, here is an example:

ENABLED="true"
OPTIONS="--proxy-lua-script=/usr/share/mysql-proxy/rw-splitting.lua
         --proxy-address=192.168.1.140:3306
         --proxy-backend-addresses=192.168.1.20:3306
         --proxy-read-only-backend-addresses=192.168.1.23:3306
         --proxy-read-only-backend-addresses=192.168.1.24:3306"

In this example the proxy binds to 192.168.1.140 port 3306 and does read/write splitting. Writing statements are directed to 192.168.1.20 port 3306 (master), and reading statements are loadbalanced between 192.168.1.23 port 3306 (first slave) and 192.168.1.24 port 3306 (second slave).

Last weekend I updated the Debian package of MySQL to 5.0.67, the latest Community Edition release. It was not uploaded into the Debian archive, but is available from my home directory on gluck (amd64 only at the moment). The next Debian release lenny is frozen already, which means no newer upstream releases get accepted into testing before lenny is released, hence lenny definitely gets shipped with MySQL 5.0.51a. We will not see MySQL 5.0.67 or 5.1 in lenny, but we will continue providing backports of newer MySQL releases.

Our current primary goal regarding the MySQL packages in Debian is to get 5.0.51a in shape for lenny, so please do not send us mails asking about MySQL 5.1 or MySQL Cluster. When lenny got released we will upload MySQL 5.0.67 (or any newer community release) to unstable, and will then take care of MySQL 5.1 and MySQL Cluster.