Databases

Due to a bug in britney, the Debian testing migration tool, MySQL is currently not available in testing. The issue is known and being worked on already, and it is documented in the Debian bug tracking system.

Update: Meanwhile the issue was fixed, MySQL is available in testing again.

MySQL 5.1 was uploaded to Debian unstable, and until we get it into testing, I am providing semi-official up-to-date backports of MySQL 5.1.36 and 5.0.84 for i386 and amd64 in my home directory on people.debian.org. I am providing MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 4.0 and 5.0, and MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 5.0. If you need MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 4.0 as well, please let me know.

MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 4.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.0/ etch-backports main

MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 5.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.0/ lenny-backports main

MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 5.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.1/ lenny-backports main

When MySQL 5.1.36 (or newer) made it into testing, I am going to move the MySQL 5.1 backport to backports.org, where it belongs. MySQL 5.0 will then completely disappear from the development branches of Debian.

Beware that the MySQL 5.1 packages do not include MySQL Cluster support, it was dropped from MySQL 5.1 a while ago, and is now available as a separate product. Unfortunately MySQL Cluster is not yet available in Debian, packaging it is one of the big items on my TODO list.

Thanks to Christian Hammers, we finally have MySQL 5.1 in Debian unstable, which completely replaces MySQL 5.0. Please update all build-dependencies from libmysqlclient15-dev to libmysqlclient-dev and upload a rebuild version of your package.

As a positive side-effect, we no longer care about MySQL bug #41728, which was the reason why no newer version of MySQL 5.0 made it into testing since lenny got released.

During the last few months I was the only person working on the MySQL packages in Debian, and I could really need some help. Currently there is MySQL 5.0.32 in etch, 5.0.51a in lenny, 5.0.75 in unstable and 5.1.31 in experimental, and I am also trying to get MySQL Cluster and MySQL Workbench into Debian. All in all it is way too much work for only one developer.

If you are an interested Debian developer/maintainer with a good knowledge in MySQL and shared library packaging, drop me a mail.

Based on the official Ubuntu 8.04 package from Sun (thanks to Alfredo Kojima) I prepared a package of MySQL Workbench 5.1.7 for Debian. I am going to upload it to experimental soon, in the meanwhile it is available (amd64 only) from here:

http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-workbench-oss/

Feedback appreciated!

Last week I finally decided to try out micro-blogging using Twitter. I am not going to post much personal stuff there, but mostly technical (especially Debian and MySQL related) stuff, here are my updates.

The MySQL packages in Debian still do not (and will never) include inofficial feature patches (beside the redirect output of error.log to syslog in MySQL 5.0, which is now part of the official MySQL 5.1 releases) like the ones from Percona or Google. Of course we add important bugfixes from newer (not yet released) versions of MySQL, but no feature patches.

If you are interested in a patched version of the Debian MySQL packages, take a look at OurDelta, their builds include patches (complete list) like mirrored binlog and InnoDB freeze. Upgrading from the official Debian packages of MySQL to the builds from OurDelta should work without problems, but please use Launchpad when reporting bugs against their packages, and not the Debian Bug Tracking System.

This week MySQL released version 5.0.75 of their Community Edition. The package in testing is in good shape, so I had time to prepare and upload 5.0.75-1 to unstable, but it should work on testing as well. I also made a rebuild for etch, which is available here.

In the next upload of MySQL 5.1.30 to the experimental branch of Debian we are going to drop MySQL Cluster support from the standard MySQL packages. I already wrote something about the future of MySQL Cluster in Debian a while ago, this is just the first step towards a separate mysql-cluster package in Debian.

This change does not (and will never) affect the MySQL packages in etch and lenny, and unstable not until we decide to move MySQL 5.1 from experimental to unstable.

Yesterday I visited the MySQL Customer Conference in Munich, as I did last year. The agenda was quite similar to last year's agenda, but I was really surprised how much Sun hardware and software products were integrated (forced?) into most of the not so technical talks.

All in all the conference was okay, but not as good as last year.

This morning I finally found some time to add an init script to the Debian package of mysql-proxy (0.6.1-3 which includes it was just uploaded to unstable, I will try to get a freeze exception for lenny). It is disabled by default, because mysql-proxy is quite useless without a proper configuration. It can be enabled in /etc/default/mysql-proxy, here is an example:

ENABLED="true"
OPTIONS="--proxy-lua-script=/usr/share/mysql-proxy/rw-splitting.lua
         --proxy-address=192.168.1.140:3306
         --proxy-backend-addresses=192.168.1.20:3306
         --proxy-read-only-backend-addresses=192.168.1.23:3306
         --proxy-read-only-backend-addresses=192.168.1.24:3306"

In this example the proxy binds to 192.168.1.140 port 3306 and does read/write splitting. Writing statements are directed to 192.168.1.20 port 3306 (master), and reading statements are loadbalanced between 192.168.1.23 port 3306 (first slave) and 192.168.1.24 port 3306 (second slave).

Last weekend I updated the Debian package of MySQL to 5.0.67, the latest Community Edition release. It was not uploaded into the Debian archive, but is available from my home directory on gluck (amd64 only at the moment). The next Debian release lenny is frozen already, which means no newer upstream releases get accepted into testing before lenny is released, hence lenny definitely gets shipped with MySQL 5.0.51a. We will not see MySQL 5.0.67 or 5.1 in lenny, but we will continue providing backports of newer MySQL releases.

Our current primary goal regarding the MySQL packages in Debian is to get 5.0.51a in shape for lenny, so please do not send us mails asking about MySQL 5.1 or MySQL Cluster. When lenny got released we will upload MySQL 5.0.67 (or any newer community release) to unstable, and will then take care of MySQL 5.1 and MySQL Cluster.

MySQL 5.1.24 was released last week. I am nearly done with preparing and testing the updated package for Debian, and will upload it to experimental within the next few days. MySQL AB decided to disable Cluster support from their official binaries with 5.1.24, but unfortunately they forgot to add a note to the release notes. It was only mentioned in a bugreport where someone asked why mysqld does no longer understand the --ndbcluster option in 5.1.24:

It was decided that we do not support NDB Cluster in the 5.1 release but do a general release of the Carrier Grade Edition 6.2 branch (which is based on MySQL 5.1) instead as it has received substantial improvements on the cluster side that can not be backported to 5.1 for now.

So while the 5.1.24 source still includes the cluster storage it is not built into the binaries released by us. A MySQL Cluster 6.2.x binary release is expected to be become available before end of April.

I am still thinking about how we should handle the new situation in Debian, hence I will keep Cluster support enabled at least for the first 5.1.24 upload. Maybe we will see a separate mysql-cluster (or mysql-cge) package in Debian soon...

Update: The information about changed Cluster packaging was added to the release notes.

MySQL 5.1 and up supports a plugin interface that allows the loading and unloading of server components at runtime, without restarting the server. Today I started working on a mysql-storage-engines package for MySQL 5.1 in Debian, which includes the PrimeBase XT and Sphinx storage engines. I currently do not plan to create separate binary packages (like mysql-engine-pbxt and mysql-engine-sphinx) for every single plugin.

Suggestions for additional plugins which should be added are welcome.

Today I uploaded MySQL 5.1.23 to Debian experimental. It is currently waiting in the NEW queue for manual approval, because thanks to Monty Taylor the libndb parts are now in separate binary packages libndbclient3 and libndbclient-dev. Until it is getting approved to experimental, the updated package is available (amd64 only) from my home directory on gluck.