After the standard house cleaning items, Steaphen Greene from Facebook came out to discuss WebScaleSQL.  WebScaleSQL is a collaboration project between a number of companies supporting large Web applications on MySQL (Alibaba, FaceBook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter).  This is a branch of MySQL modified by all the companies.  They also work with MariaDB, Oracle, and Percona on their development.  He gave a lot of praise to Oracle for their work on MySQL.  Some interesting features are:

• Asynchronous MySQL Client
• Lower InnoDB buffer pool memory footprint
• Reduced double-write mode
• Server-side query management features
  • Query throttling etc.
• Logical read-ahead (faster backups)

Coming features

• On-line InnoDB rebuilds
• DocStore
• MySQL and RocksDB

He then wrapped up with a discussion on the legal challenges of trying to get WebScale changes into the main MySQL code branch.

Then Patrik Sallner from MariaDB came up and gave a talk on how open source can help solve data management problems.  His slide on the data storage subway map was very interesting and worth trying to find.  He points out that open source provides for greater collaboration between companies and reduce the duplication of efforts.  He showed how MariaDB has included changes from a large list of companies into their code base.  One feature discussed of interest was the Connect Storage Engine which allows federation of data from other data platforms.  MariaDB 10.1 will have Galera in the base code so no separate binaries, activation is based on configuration.  10.1 will also have tablespace and table level encryption built in. My take away was that I need to look into Webyog and Sea Lion for monitoring.

After Patrik, Tomas Ulin from Oracle came out to celebrate the 20th anniversary of MySQL.  It is also been 10 years that Oracle has owned InnoDB and 5 owning MySQL.  5.7 Release candidate was announced last week.  Highlights of 5.7 are:

• 2 x faster then 5.6
• Enhanced InnoDB: faster online and bulk load operations
• Replication Improvements: multi master multi threaded slaves (8-10x faster slaves)
• New optimizer cost model: greater user control and better query performance
• performance schema improvements
• Query Rewrite Plugin
• JSON support added (labs now but planned for GA)
• Functional indexes (wasn’t clear if this was new)
• SYS Schema improvements to help with monitoring and administration
• GIS improvements
• InnoDB improvements
  • Native partitioning
  • configurable fill factor
  • Buffer Pool resize online
  • Separate UNDO tablespace
• Group Replication (probably not available for GA see labs.mysql.com)

Then he talked about MySQL Fabric 1.5.  The product sounds promising and we will take a look at this.  Also, Workbench 6.3 will have support for Fabric and many of these other features (just went RC).  Call for papers ends in two weeks for Open World.

Last but not least Robert Hodges from VMWare came out to talk about the cloud.  He talked about how VMWare is looking to build a public cloud that better integrates with private clouds that Enterprises already have.  The talk was basically a overview of the features of the newest version of VMWare.