Dec 21, 2012

2012, the Best Year for MySQL (...so far, but more to come)

It's the end of the year and, before the world ends ;-) , I feel the pressure to follow up on last year's article "2011, a great year for MySQL in Review". I'll adopt a similar format and mention things in context, covering products, marketing, momentum, etc. at a high level. I may have missed something and I hope my colleagues will contribute to the list.

I really do think it's been the best year for MySQL so far... well, at least since when I signed my contract with MySQL AB at the end of 2007. We're just at the beginning of our journey and I wish to the MySQL family, to our community and ecosystem an even better 2013!

Summary
With MySQL Cluster 7.2 GA, MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate and Cluster 7.3 DMR this is the start of something exceptional. These products are introducing long-awaited features and received very positive feedback from our community.

New windows tools joined the party to help customers migrate from Microsoft SQL Server and access MySQL from Excel. MySQL Cluster Manager has been updated and the new auto-installer saw the light of the day. We improved our Connectors, released new ones and delivered additional value to MySQL Enterprise Edition customers. We've also held our first ever MySQL Connect conference that's been a phenomenal success and the MySQL momentum is growing exponentially.

Products
MySQL 5.6 will be loved by developers, giving them more freedom to build next generation applications. With huge performance improvements, new NoSQL access and better replication, that's going to be the best MySQL release to date.
New options for High Availability are waiting to be deployed in your data centers to increase service levels and policy-based auditing will make your servers safer.
MySQL Cluster 7.2 went GA in February, initially delivering 1.2 Billion queries per minute, but then beating his own achievement and producing 1.1 Billion queries writes per minute. Adaptive Query Localization and better ease of use increased Cluster use cases. Leveraging our Not-Only SQL strategy, the latest previews introduced Node.JS access to provide developers further flexibility. Last but not least, Foreign Keys are now part of MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR.

Case Studies
A lot of case studies can be found here, but let me pick some of the recent noteworthy ones:
  • MySQL Cluster Powers El Chavo from Playful Play, Latin America's Most Popular Facebook Game.
  • RedeHost Quadriples Backup Speed with MySQL Enterprise Edition
  • With Its MySQL Database-as-a-Service CERN Empowers Scientists
  • StayFriends Secures a Leading Position Among European Social Media Sites with Robust, High-Performance, Relational Database
  • Tilgin Improves Subscriber Device Management by Enabling Telecommunications Operators with Robust Database Solution
  • Verizon Wireless Supports its Mission-Critical Employee Portal with MySQL
  • A special mention goes to Twitter, who's handled a huge workload with MySQL during 2012 Presidential Elections
Events & Momentum
At the first ever MySQL Connect conference, Edward Screven presented enlightening statistics:
  • Over 15 Million Estimated Active Installations
  • Facebook: 163k Fans, +35% Yoy Growth
  • Twitter: 25k Followers, +67% Yoy Growth
  • MySQL Newsletter: 1,4m Subscribers, +20% YoY Growth
  • Events: Dozens Of Fully Booked Dev Days & Tech Tours
  • Awards: CRN, Linux Journal, PHP Architect...
Several of those numbers have grown since then, and MySQL once again got awarded the Linux Journal Reader’s Choice Award as Best Database for 2012.

People are downloading, tweeting, liking, adopting and blogging about MySQL at a great pace. Embedding MySQL has become a common practice. Adoption in the Cloud is skyrocketing and MySQL has emerged as the leading database, offered by the vast majority of cloud services providers. MySQL is also a key component of big data platforms, with Hadoop vendors estimating 80% of their deployments are integrated with MySQL. MySQL is everywhere!

To all MySQL users, customers, partners, colleagues, developers, advocates and aficionados: Thank you for another amazing year! Go MySQL!
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Nov 19, 2012

Meeting the MySQL Team at UKOUG (ICC Birmingham, December 3-5 | 2012)

Come and see us...
If you're planning to attend UKOUG in Birmingham on Dec 3-5, here's your guide to know more about Oracle's MySQL.

There's a MySQL stream on Monday 5th and we've a great list of sessions, including:
I'd like also to mention Dr. David Harper, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, on Better Living Trough Metadata: Harnessing the Power of MySQL Information Schema.

Want to meet myself or my team at the UKOUG? Feel free to get in touch via LinkedIn or Twitter.

Want to come prepared? Here's what you can read beforehand:
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Oct 15, 2012

MySQL Enterprise Monitor, my super powers and my life

Last week I had an enlightening experience. It may sound strange, but I found I have super powers... let me explain.

I had a meeting with a big customer of mine to show the value of MySQL Enterprise and Cluster CGE and to share with them the latest and greatest features available in our commercial offerings. During the discussion I said: "Imagine if your MySQL database has a problem at 3pm. Thanks to My Oracle Support and MySQL Enterprise Monitor you can quickly resolve your issues and restore the service".

MySQL Enterprise Monitor
Well, this is exactly what happened at 2.50pm... I missed the prophecy by just 10m and found I have super powers!

You could imagine how happy the customer was about my incredible abilities ;)
However, thanks to MySQL Enterprise Monitor, I'm still alive and I'm here to tell the story.

By using correlated graphs we've been able to filter all the events running at that time and quickly diagnose the problem. For those of you who're curious, they had an issue on their advertising network and, at that particular time, all the banners pointed to the portal bringing the number of active MySQL connections to 8000+ and putting a lot of pressure on the database. In the troubleshooting process we also found some regular spikes in the charts, probably related to batches they weren't aware of and they started an internal discussion to find the cause.

At the end I've learned a few things:
  • MySQL Enterprise Monitor is an amazing troubleshooting tool and could also be used to start a conversation between DBAs and DEVs
  • Never mention, during a customer visit, that the database might have a problem... or this could really happen
  • I've a debt of gratitude with the my colleagues in the MySQL Enterprise team at Oracle. Guys, the next time we meet, drinks are on me ;)
That's it... thanks for taking the time to read this life-changing story ;)
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Jun 4, 2012

MySQL Events that I don't want to miss

Do you want to closely follow what MySQL is doing around the globe? We've created a Lanyrd guide just for that. It's curated by the MySQL Community, Marketing, Presales and Product Management teams and with some other contributions too.
Tomorrow we'll host the MySQL Innovation Day (in streaming too) and MySQL Connect is also quickly approaching. If you'd like showcase your products and services to the MySQL Community you can take advantage of the various sponsorship opportunities.

Stay tuned for the latest and greatest updates from the MySQL team at Oracle and from our vibrant community!
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May 16, 2012

MySQL Cluster 7.2 -- Unlimited Possibilities

We've recently seen some great announcements of MySQL Cluster delivering amazing results for both selects and updates. The posts (see related articles below) are full of juicy technical details and proofs, but today I'd like to change the perspective a bit. Let's compare those figures with real-world data and imagine what could be done. Please note that I'm not using any scientific method here, just dreaming about the unlimited opportunities offered by MySQL Cluster today.

MySQL Cluster 7.2.7 -- 1B+ Writes per Minute
Cluster can deliver 1B+ selects per minute with 8 nodes and 1B+ updates per minute with 30 nodes.

Our planet is getting quite populated and interconnected. World population is 7B+ and 2B+ of us are using internet. Let's assume that, due to time-zones, only 1/3 of the total internet population is online at a given time (700M+) and that a single action generates one update and one select on the database.

What kind of services can we offer then?

With such scalability and performance, MySQL Cluster offers endless opportunities to develop something new that can support the exponential growth of the web and offer always-on services to everyone, for example:
  • Hellos from the world -- a website where everyone can say hello to the world, whenever they want. MySQL Cluster can handle the entire online population in less than 1 minute;
  • Let's shop together -- a global eCommerce website selling everything with 100% market share. If everyone would buy an item per minute, MySQL Cluster could easily fulfill the needs of the entire internet population with 30 nodes;
  • Like everything you like -- a like button that can be attached to everything in order to collect statistics on users' favorite things. MySQL Cluster could easily sustain the total online world assuming they'd like 1 thing per minute;
Furthermore, MySQL Cluster could handle updates from all of Zynga's 60M active daily users in 3 seconds or all of Facebook's 900M+ active users in less than a minute. All of that giving you ACID compliance and synchronous replication to ensure no data loss.

The Oracle MySQL engineering team did a great job with Cluster: let's build the next big thing with it!

Related articles


Jan 8, 2012

Changing Name and Improving Focus

You might have noticed that this blog changed name and URL. Instead of having one single blog for everything, I decided to split my blogging activities in two separate blogs.

If you're interested in MySQL, Oracle, Databases, Business Intelligence, Open Source, Cloud, etc. this is the place to be. Blog's new name is Data & Co.
A big "Thank you!" to David Stokes who moved all the planet.mysql.com references to the old blog to this new one.

On the other hand, if you'd like to read about communication, marketing, advertising, PR, soft skills, etc. feel free look at Publicime.  Please see the introduction of my new blog here. I've moved non-technical articles to this one to make sure my posts on Data & Co are exclusively technology-centric.

This will result in better focus for both blogs and I won't annoy you with topics you're not interested in. The old url is redirecting to Data & Co. by default.