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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 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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GRAPH engine – Mk.II

The GRAPH engine allows you to deal with hierarchies and graphs in a purely relational way. So, we can find all children of an item, path from an item to a root node, shortest path between two items, and so on, each with a simple basic query structure using standard SQL grammar.

The engine is implemented as a MySQL/MariaDB 5.1 plugin (we’re working on a 5.0 backport for some clients) and thus runs with an unmodified server.

Demo time! I’ll simplify/strip a little bit here for space reasons, but what’s here is plain cut/paste from a running server, no edits

-- insert a few entries with connections (and multiple paths)
insert into foo (origid, destid) values (1,2), (2,3), (2,4), (4,5), (3,6), (5,6);
-- a regular table to join on to
insert into people values (1,"pearce"),(2,"hunnicut"),(3,"potter"),
                          (4,"hoolihan"),(5,"winchester"),(6,"mulcahy");
-- find us the shortest path from pearce (1) to mulcahy (6) please
select group_concat(people.name order by seq) as path
  from foo join people on (foo.linkid=people.id)
  where latch=1 and origid=1 and destid=6;
+--------+--------+--------------------------------+
| origid | destid | path                           |
+--------+--------+--------------------------------+
|      1 |      6 | pearce,hunnicut,potter,mulcahy |
+--------+--------+--------------------------------+
-- find us all people we can get to from potter (3)
select origid,group_concat(people.name order by seq) as destinations
  from foo join people on (foo.linkid=people.id)
  where latch=1 and origid=3;
+--------+----------------+
| origid | destinations   |
+--------+----------------+
|      3 | mulcahy,potter |
+--------+----------------+

-- find us all people from where we can get to hoolihan (4)
select origid,group_concat(people.name order by seq) as origins
  from foo join people on (foo.linkid=people.id)
  where latch=1 and destid=4;
+--------+--------------------------+
| origid | origins                  |
+--------+--------------------------+
|      4 | hoolihan,hunnicut,pearce |
+--------+--------------------------+

So, there you have it. A graph (in this case a simple unidirectional tree, aka hierarchy) that looks like a table to us, as do the resultsets that have been computed.

This is still a early implementation, we’re still enhancing the storage efficiency (in memory) and speed, and adding persistence. We’re also looking for a suitable large dataset that would allow us to seriously test the system, find bugs and assess speed. If you happen to have a large hierarchical structure, but especially a social graph you could obfuscate and give to us, that would be great!

Also, if you’re interested in deploying the GRAPH engine or have questions or additional needs, we’d be happy to talk with you.

select origid,group_concat(people.name order by seq) as destinations from foo join people on (foo.linkid=people.id) where latch=1 and origid=4;
+——–+—————————–+
| origid | destinations                |
+——–+—————————–+
|      4 | mulcahy,winchester,hoolihan |
+——–+—————————–+
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TYPE= disappears again (MySQL 5.4.4)

I like the 5.4 developments, overall. It has useful stuff and is being developed and released a reasonable pace. Good progress. While perusing the MySQL 5.4.4 changelog, one particular change drew my attention, since it’s been (re)appearing since 2006. It’s the removal of the TYPE= keyword which was obsoleted since MySQL 4.1 in favour of the ENGINE= syntax in CREATE/ALTER TABLE.

While on the surface it may seem ok to remove the obsolete keyword, there are quite a few apps out there that use it, and that cannot be changed. So these will now be unable to use MySQL 5.4 or beyond. I filed this as a bug in 2006, MySQL bug#17501. If you’re interested in the “history of reappearance”, take a peek at the comments and their timeline. I just put in a new comment to note the 5.4.4 change.

I suppose that a new developer comes along and reckon that removing this keyword is a good idea. But really, why do we need to remove one keyword from the parser? Because that’s all it is. And removing it really does break apps.
Let’s not. Again. Please! And this time please put a comment in the parser source files, referring to the bug#, so that it doesn’t get recycled at a later date. Please just leave it in.

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