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Press Release 2018-09-11: Open Query acquired by Catalyst IT Australia Pty Limited

We are pleased to announce that Open Query, Queensland-based provider of MySQL, MariaDB and related services which just celebrated its 11-th anniversary, has been acquired by Catalyst IT Australia.

Founded in New Zealand in 1997, Catalyst is an experienced and respected Open Source integrator.  Catalyst is looking forward to the opportunity to work with the current Open Query clients as well as with new prospects. Catalyst offers a broad suite of Enterprise services, including support and custom development for Drupal CMS, SilverStripe CMS, Moodle LMS, Samba and other software, as well as fully managed hosting on AWS and other platforms.

“Catalyst’s core values are very much aligned with those of Open Query, which is why we are particularly pleased with this outcome”, notes Arjen Lentz, Founder and Exec.Director of Open Query.

Catalyst IT Australia has offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Contacts

For Open Query Pty Ltd

Arjen Lentz, Exec.Director
https://openquery.com.au

For Catalyst IT Australia Pty Limited

Andrew Boag, Managing Director
https://www.catalyst-au.net/
Phone (02) 8203 9777

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Business insight from the MySQL Conference 2010

At this year’s conference, I was pleasantly surprised with the high level of interest in Open Query’s proactive services for MySQL and MariaDB, and specifically our focus on preventing problems, while explicitly not offering emergency services.

I’ll describe what this is about first, and why I reckon it’s interesting. When you think about it, most IT related support that includes emergency (24×7) operates similar to this:

You have a house that has the front and back doors wide open with no locks, and you take out an insurance policy for the house contents. After a short time you call the insurance company “guess what, the most terrible thing happened, my TV got stolen.” Insurance company responds “that’s dreadful, you poor soul, let us fix it all up for you with getting a new TV and installing it. It’ll be our pleasure to serve you.” A few weeks later you call the insurance company again “guess what …” and they help you in the same fabulous way.

You get the idea, it’s rather silly because it’s very predictable. If you leave your doors open, you’re very close to actually being the cause of the problem yourself and insurance companies tend to not cover you under such circumstances – yet most IT support arrangements do. If IT support were actually run like insurance, premiums would be based on a risk assessment, and consequentially most companies would have to pay much higher premiums.

Much of this is actually about company processes as much as the technical setup. Depending on how you arrange things in your business, you can actually be very “emergency prone”. Since company processes are notoriously hard to change, many businesses operate in a way that is fundamentally not suitable for Open Query to do business with. That’s a fact and we’re fine with it, the market is big enough. We have clients all around the world, but so far very few from Silicon Valley. My presumption was that this was due to the way those businesses are often set up, making them simply incompatible for our services. But a significant number of companies we spoke with at and around the conference were very interested in our services exactly because of the way we work, and so that to me was interesting news. A good lesson, making attending the conference extra worthwhile. It’s also a good vote of confidence in the way we’ve set up our service offering.

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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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Ken Jacobs leaves Oracle

Matt Asay writes today in Oracle loses some MySQL mojo about Ken Jacobs leaving Oracle. For me, that’s a major bummer. Ken has been a long-time visitor of the MySQL Conference and that’s where I first met him: a friendly and knowledgeable person, on database technology in general but also about MySQL. When Innobase Oy got bought by Oracle, InnoDB got placed under Ken’s leadership and did pretty well there. We’d occasionally exchange emails, and I’ve always found him to be responsive and helpful.

I think it was kinda presumed by people that the technical part of MySQL at Oracle would also reside with Ken. Obviously now, that’s not going to be the case. What that means exactly, I don’t know as I am not familiar with the other person (Edward Screven). We’ve got to know Ken over the years, so it would’ve been nice to keep going with him. Ohwell.

Now we’ll see what Edward does with it all, and how he will interact with the MySQL community. And I wonder what new adventures Ken might be off to, if any?

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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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Petition for MySQL consideration in Oracle+Sun merger

MySQL requires special consideration in the Oracle+Sun merger, otherwise both Oracle and MySQL users and vendors will literally pay the price. If you agree, please sign this petition now.

To be very clear, Open Query is in favour of the merger, we feel that overall it’s a good fit. We would also like to see it happen quickly, as obviously this is best for Sun employees and clients, as well as Oracle’s broad business prospects.  Read more

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The Future of MySQL (EU Crunch Time)

You’ve probably seen Monty’s post Help Saving MySQL. This is about

  1. Development (will Oracle put significant effort into MySQL, actually innovating)
  2. Brand (“MySQL” has a huge footprint), the trademark owner can enforce this – there have already been issues with companies offering MySQL related services via Google AdWords not being able to use the word MySQL in their ad text even though it was correctly used as an adjective.
  3. Forking is fine, but still has to deal with the branding. For MySQL, that’s possibly the most significant issue of any OSS product ever encountered. You’re not competing against a company, but against an existing brand footprint that you (because of the trademark) have to steer clear of. So “just fork it” is not an easy or short term option, there’s more involved than technical/development work.
  4. Code IP – to some degree (IMHO less important), it’s the thing that enables dual licensing. I regard dual licensing as a pest that’s best got rid of.

The really important thing to realise is that this is not about “killing Sun to save MySQL”, or “sending the right message to investors”. The former is merely a consequence of Oracle’s unwillingness to discuss any other option (whether rightfully or not, that’s just a fact) and the latter has no direct bearing on what’s right for either MySQL or Oracle – it’s definitely a factor that the investor world may consider, but it wouldn’t be a consideration for the EU.

With all that noted… please look at Monty’s post, he provides options and links to for you to action whichever way forward you feel is appropriate, whether for or against or neutral towards Oracle being able to take over Sun with MySQL in unmodified fashion. I think it’s good for more users (essentially interested parties) to express their opinion, since Oracle has managed to mobilise its own customers to flood the EU with their angle. While valid, the result ends up being a tad one-sided!

As I wrote on my comment/update on the Possible Movement in the Oracle/Sun/MySQL/EU Case, it’s unfortunate that the rumour suggesting that Oracle was willing to have MySQL as a separate business entity turned out to not be true, as I reckon it would have been a useful outcome for both Oracle and MySQL. A company can’t/won’t disrupt itself, and there are serious business-related “conflicts” to deal with if a single company sells both both products. Corporate structures and sales will always make decisions to steer away from competing with itself, and generally choose the most profitable road. Which one of the two that is in this case is not relevant, my take is that in the market both Oracle and MySQL have their place, so having either one lose out would not be good.

Irrespective of good intentions, companies do abide by certain rules – well actually many companies are ignorant of them and waste tons of money essentially trying to defy gravity. In any case, for me the issue is not with Oracle having good intentions or mistrusting that, the issue is that not even Oracle can defy gravity. The effort will go where the money is.

Remember what I quoted long ago about IBM and the PC? (Innovator’s Dilemma – Clayton Christensen), IBM planted the new department in another state with its own management and finances, because they knew that in the corporate/management decisions, inevitably the existing mainframe business would win and thus prevent any cannibalisation (from within) of its position. In a nutshell, a company can’t disrupt itself. It’s well documented. I think that overall, the Oracle/Sun deal is a good match. But also, I think MySQL needs to be handled properly to make sure that both MySQL and Oracle (the db product) will thrive in the future. I feel that’s what’s important.

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The search for MySQL 5.5

So, MySQL 6.0 was ditched, and a few weeks ago 5.4 was also – its features to be added in other (earlier) versions (I’m told 5.2 but not sure). I reckon that’s good news, regardless of the version number. There was also an announcement about a change in the release mechanism at Sun/MySQL.

Now for practicals. If I look on Launchpad, the 5.1 branch is the only active one (next to 5.0 fixes, of course). 5.4 was last updated 15 weeks ago. There is no 5.2 on there that I can find. Wasn’t looking for it really, just happened to notice its absence while I was trying to find 5.5. And the reason for that was that Miguel closed a bug I was following, noting it was no longer reproducible in 5.5. He pastes some code that reports mysql as 5.5, so it’s not a typo.

So, in addition to the above list of abandonment (5.4, 6.0), we have 5.2 which I’m told should exist but doesn’t at Launchpad, and 5.5 which appears to exist and is news to me yet doesn’t appear to be out there either. Are you confused? I am.

The particular bug was found during a training session and occurs on Windows. Now the bug is closed, but we can’t see code and have no indication when it or binaries will be available. So what do I tell a user asking about the bug and its apparent fix? (I have to say apparent because Miguel’s response indicate that it’s merely not reproducible on the later version, there’s no specific fix)

Updates

  • Vladislav Vainroub notes there’s a mysql-next-mr branch on launchpad which is in fact version 5.5 inside. It appears to be mirrored, last sync 5 minutes ago but last changeset 39 hours ago. So this seems like a publishing branch, not a development branch (otherwise we’d see more activity).
  • Paul DuBois tells that the mysql-server trunk on launchpad is now 5.5. Last activity is from a week ago, so I presume that like the abovementioned mysql-next-mr branch it’s synced and not actually from a live development branch. Pity.
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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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Trivia: identify this replication failure

We got good responses to the “identify this query profile” question. Indeed it indicates an SQL injection attack. Obviously a code problem, but you must also think about “what can we do right now to stop this”. See the responses and my last note on it below the original post.

Got a new one for you!

You find a system with broken replication, could be a slave or one in a dual master setup. the IO thread is still running. but the SQL thread is not and the last error is (yes the error string is exactly this, very long – sorry I did not paste this string into the original post – updated later):

“Could not parse relay log event entry. The possible reasons are: the master’s binary log is corrupted (you can check this by running ‘mysqlbinlog’ on the binary log), the slave’s relay log is corrupted (you can check this by running ‘mysqlbinlog’ on the relay log), a network problem, or a bug in the master’s or slave’s MySQL code. If you want to check the master’s binary log or slave’s relay log, you will be able to know their names by issuing ‘SHOW SLAVE STATUS’ on this slave.”

In other similar cases the error message is about something else but the query it shows with it makes no sense. To me, that essentially says the same as the above.

The server appears to have been restarted recently.

What’s wrong, and what’s your quickest way to get replication going again given this state?

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