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MariaDB Foundation

You may have already seen the announcement MariaDB Foundation to Safeguard Leading Open Source Database. We at Open Query wholeheartedly support this (r)evolution of the MySQL ecosystem, which appears to be increasingly necessary as Oracle Corp is seriously dropping the ball with security updates and actually just general development and innovation. Oracle has actually done some very good work, I happily acknowledge that – but security issues are critical, having crashing bugs and incorrect query results in a .28 of a GA release is uncool, and not incorporating awesome development efforts by the community is just astonishing.

MariaDB is where the Sphinx fulltext search and OQGraph engines are integrated, the community developed virtual columns and Galera synchronous replication are added, and the fabulous developers at Monty Program have taken the time to fix up the previously ghastly performance of subqueries so that they now rock. And that’s apart from the many little bugs Monty Program has fixed along the way. Awesome work, guys!

MariaDB still merges from stock MySQL, but it’s important to not be dependent on that – the MariaDB Foundation can help support that already existing effort and raise the profile of MariaDB to – as far as I’m concerned – move on from MySQL.

From our end, apart from our continued active involvement in the community, Open Query will be adjusting and augmenting its fee structure so that our clients co-fund MariaDB Foundation and contributing companies such as Codership (Galera). MySQL and MariaDB are mission critical for businesses. It’s not (and never has been) a case of volunteers and mere charity. We all p(l)ay our part.

It’s time to upgrade.

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Open Query @ DrupalConSF

Peter and Arjen will be at DrupalCon SF 2010. Peter specifically for the event, Arjen staying around the SF area after the MySQL Conference last week.

Specifically, we’ll be talking with people about using the OQGRAPH engine to help with social graphs and other similar problems, easily inside Drupal. You may recall that Peter already created the friendlist_graph extension for the friendlist Drupal module.

From the MySQL Conf and other earlier feedback, OQGRAPH is proving to be a real enabler. And since it’s free/GPLv2 and integrated in MariaDB 5.2, there’s generally no hindrance in starting to use it.

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Open Query @ MySQL Conf & Expo 2010

Walter and I are giving a tutorial on Monday morning, MySQL (and MariaDB) Dual Master Setups with MMM, I believe there are still some seats available – tutorials are a bit extra when you register for the conference, so you do need to sign up if you want to be there! It’s a hands-on tutorial/workshop, we’ll be setting up multiple clusters with dual master and the whole rest of the MMM fun, using VMs on your laptops and a separate wired network. Nothing beats messing with something live, breaking it, and seeing what happens!

Then on Tuesday afternoon (5:15pm, Ballroom F), Antony and I will do a session on the OQGRAPH engine: hierarchies/graphs inside the database made easy. If you’ve been struggling with trees in SQL, would really like to effectively use social networking in your applications, need to work with RDF datasets, or have been exploring neo4j but otherwise have everything in MySQL or MariaDB, this session is for you.

We (and a few others from OQ) will be around for the entire conference, the community dinner (Monday evening) and other social events, and are happy to answer any questions you might have. You’ll be able to easily recognise us in the crowds by our distinct friendly Open Query olive green shirts (green stands out because most companies mainly use blue/grey and orange/red).

Naturally we would love to do business with you (proactive support services, OQGRAPH development), but we don’t push ourselves on to unsuitable scenarios. In fact, we’re known to refer and even actively introduce clients to competent other vendors where appropriate. In any case, it’s our pleasure and privilege to meet you!

See you all in Santa Clara in a few days.

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Friendlist Graph Module for Drupal

At DrupalSouth 2010 (Wellington) after LCA2010, Peter and I implemented a Drupal module as a practical example of how the OQGRAPH engine can be used to enable social networking trickery in any website. The friendlist_graph module (available from GitHub) extends friendlist, which implements basic functionality of friends (2-way) and fans (1-way) for Drupal users.

The friendlist_graph module transposes the friendlist data using an OQGRAPH table, allowing you to query it in new and interesting ways. By adding some extra Drupal Views, it allows you to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with your Drupal users or find out how two arbitrary users are connected. It can find a path of arbitrary length near-instantly. Previously, you’d just avoid doing any such thing as it’s somewhere between impossible/limited/slow/painful in a regular relational schema.

Now think beyond: retrieve/share connections using Open Social, FOAF, Twitter/Identi.ca, logins with OpenID, and you “instantly” get a very functional social networking enabled site that does not rely on localised critical mass!

We tested with about a million users in Drupal (and approx 3.5 million random connections), which worked fine – the later demo at the DrupalSouth stuffed up because I hadn’t given the demo VM sufficient memory.

Naturally, you could do the same in Joomla! or another CMS or any site for that matter, we just happened to be at DrupalSouth so a Drupal module was the obvious choice. Take a peek at the code, it’s pretty trivial. Just make sure you run a version of MySQL that has the OQGRAPH engine, for instance 5.0.87-d10 (Sail edition!) from OurDelta.

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OQGRAPH at OpenSQL Camp 2009, Portland

Antony is travelling up to Portland for this great event that’s about to start Fri evening and going over the weekend. He’ll be showing other devs and people more about the OQGRAPH engine, and gathering useful feedback.

Open Query is, together with many others (I see Giuseppe, Facebook, Gear6, Google, Infobright, Jeremy Cole, PrimeBase Technologies, Percona, Monty Program, and lots more), sponsoring the event so that it’s accessible for everybody – reducing the key factor to getting there rather than having to worry about high conf fees.

Having acquired the world’s biggest jetlag flying to Charlottesville VA for last year’s OpenSQL Camp, I can confirm from personal experience that it’s a great event. While I can’t be there this time, I’m looking forward to hearing all about it!

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OQGRAPH update: speed, maze example, 5.0 packages

Antony has done a bit of magic, considerably speeding up inserts. Since the base implementation does not have persistence, insert speed is particularly important. Copying the 2×89,051 edges for the Tree-of-Life example is now near-instant.

The delete bug has been fixed.

There’s a new Maze example in the OQGRAPH trunk on Launchpad, first introduced in my MySQL University session. I created/inserted a maze of 1 million rooms (that comes to about 3 million edges), and OQGRAPH found the shortest path (122330 steps for this particular maze) in abound one second. That’s pretty good, I think!

Last but not least, the OurDelta builds of MySQL 5.0.87-d10 have been published (for all Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS/RHEL, generic) and the -Sail edition of the packages have OQGRAPH built-in. So if you use 5.0 or just want to play, it’s now very easy to get started!

Earlier in the week we received a message from an early OQGRAPH adopter, telling how he’s using it to manage paths in his IP network: calculations that would previously require many minutes are now completed in a fraction of a second and a single query. He admitted to be pretty much an all Oracle shop, with this OQGRAPH app being his first exploration of MySQL space. He loves OQGRAPH, and I suppose that by proxy implies he likes MySQL too 😉

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OQGRAPH session on MySQL University – recording now available

It was fun doing the MySQL University session on OQGRAPH yesterday. Now also available: slides (PDF) and audio/video recording (FLV download, if anyone can convert to a more open format, that’d be great).

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OQGRAPH engine on MySQL University – 5 Nov 2009 10:00 UTC

MySQL University logoOnly a few weeks after Walter’s session on Multi-Master Replication with MMM and thanks to the great gang at MySQL Docs (my colleagues from long ago!) I’ll be doing a MySQL University session in a few days, about the GRAPH computation engine. From talks/demos I’ve done about it so far, I’ve learnt that people love it but there are lots of interesting questions. After all, it’s a pretty new and in a way exotic thing.

MySQL University uses DimDim, an online presentation service. You’ll see slides, and hear my voice. You can also type questions in a live chat room. We actually even got desktop sharing working so a live demo is possible, we’ll see how that goes on the day (I’ll make sure to have static slides for the same also 😉

For session details and the exact link to DimDim, see the MySQL uni page for the OQGRAPH session.

To attend, please calculate the starting time for your local timezone! It’ll be very early in the morning for US people, however for Europe it will be late morning, and Asia/Pacific will be evening. If you miss the live session, there’ll be a recording online soon afterwards and of course you can contact me for questions anyway. Still, it would be be cool if lots of people attended live, that’s always extra useful. Hope to meet you there!

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OQGRAPH on Launchpad, graph examples

The MySQL 5.0 and MySQL/MariaDB 5.1 source code is now also available through Launchpad. If you were waiting for a version for 5.1 and are ok with building the plugin from source, now you can!

The repo contains a subdir for examples, we’re hoping many people will contribute little snippets and scripts to import and use interesting datasets. To give you a hint, with graph capabilities you are able to deal with RDF data sources. You just need to transform the XML to say CSV, import into a suitable structure, and copy the edge information across to an OQGRAPH table.

Roland Bouman’s tree-of-life (which uses xslt stylesheets) are a good example of that approach, and was the first entry in the examples tree, including an SQL dump of the base dataset (it was CC-NC licensed) so you don’t necessarily have to fuss with the RDF/xslt foo.

Enjoy! We want to have examples/demos, a proper testsuite (there’s a bug/wishlist for that), and more. If you can help, please do: mucking around with graphs is great fun. If you implement OQGRAPH in a “proper” app, we’d also like to hear from you. The examples are intended to get people used to what OQGRAPH can do, and thus trigger ideas for practical uses. It’s not just fun. With OQGRAPH’s capabilities and speed, you can profit.

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GRAPH Engine Linux binaries in MySQL 5.0.86-d10 available now

At this point we have a 32-bit and a 64-bit Linux binary tarball, should work on most Ubuntu and CentOS and the like (I tested a few). Possibly OSX coming. Not sure on Windows right now.

For further details and download links, see yesterday’s release post.

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