maria-discuss team mailing list archive

[Colin Charles <byte@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mark,

On 26 Sep 2013, at 22:50, MARK CALLAGHAN <mdcallag@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> If Yoshi's slides are only to serve as fodder in the MariaDB v MySQL marketing battle then I hope they don't get published. 
> 

No, these are not the only bits of fodder. I was focusing on something that you might have had some close contact with. Besides, I'm no seasoned marketeer but what kind of battle would it be if you showed that things were buggy but were getting fixed so that you could migrate to it? I'm sorry but that just seems like bad marketing to me.

> MySQL 5.6 has bugs, new features in 5.6 have even more bugs. That isn't a surprise, that is an opportunity for people like me and companies like Percona to help make it better. The surprise to me is that early 5.6 releases are in good shape despite so many changes. 

This is great.

> Negative opinions about releases should be earned. If you think 5.6.X is bad, you had better spent some time using it to figure that out. I hope this side of the world doesn't become full of unearned opinions. Too much marketing like that will limit your community.
> 

Please keep in mind that I have *never* had a negative opinion of 5.6. In fact, when I talk about things, you know I always commend the great work Oracle and Percona are doing to push the MySQL ecosystem forward. I was merely *paraphrasing* what Justin & Stewart wrote in this email thread. 

It is also my belief from past experiences with MySQL (when releases came out of MySQL AB, Sun, and even Oracle's 5.5) that it *does* take 6-9 months before you start seeing deployments and bugs ironed out. Maybe this has changed with 5.6, but on a personal note for various reasons, my first experience with 5.6 started a few months ago with 5.6.12. This is four months after it became GA. I know you have vast experiences with it, having used it and improved it since last year, so thank you.

I also hope this side of the world isn't filled with unearned opinions. It is clear that MariaDB 10 will be "5.6-like", and the decision to not be a straight merge was made last year. The reasons given were made public in various blog posts and on this list. I don't have to support MySQL 5.6, but I can imagine people on "this side of the world" do. My interest in it is merely to see what the new features are, see what people are using, and contribute usefully to make sure that they exist in some form in MariaDB. 

> Given Justin's list of problems he encountered, it looks like he earned his opinion.
> 

Which was exactly what was paraphrased/summarised here!

> 
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 1:20 AM, Colin Charles <byte@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Mark,
> 
> On 26 Sep 2013, at 16:06, MARK CALLAGHAN <mdcallag@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > Why do you claim it wasn't GA ready? By MySQL standards I think it was very stable early on. You can decide whether I am more or less biased than other people making comments on this. Given that I have no experience with something like Oracle, I am not sure that early Oracle releases for a new major version are any better.
> >
> 
> I am merely inferring from Justin's comments, which you can also read[1]. In fact, from your own team at Facebook:
> - DROP/ALTER table was slow. Fast implementation in 5.5 didn't make it to 5.6, fixed
> - GTID implementation in production is hard to do in 5.6 (I understand facebook-5.6 has some solution around this possibly)
> - http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=70265
> - http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=68220 (maybe not a bug, but a behavioural oddity)
> - https://www.facebook.com/notes/mysql-at-facebook/eq_range_index_dive_limit-system-variable-in-mysql-56/10151533648715933 (maybe even you wrote this? One can't tell from the FB note)
> 
> There's a longer list in Yoshinori's excellent talk on MySQL 5.6 at Facebook. I hope those slides make it online somewhere/sometime
> 
> And given that I also have no experience with something like Oracle, I have no idea if their new releases are any better either or take a similar amount of time to stabalize
> 
> I see you have commented on the blog post, I look forward to the discussion there as well.
> 
> cheers,
> -colin
> 
> [1] - What maybe is not clear overall are the reasons as to why some features in MariaDB are being re-written. I see some good documentation in an example like https://mariadb.atlassian.net/browse/MDEV-452 but this is not always the case as to why there is reasoning for a decision (some are probably in commit logs, some are probably discussed on IRC, etc.)
> 
> 
> --
> Colin Charles, Chief Evangelist
> MariaDB | t: +6-012-204-3201 | Skype: colincharles
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Mark Callaghan
> mdcallag@xxxxxxxxx

--
Colin Charles, Chief Evangelist
MariaDB | t: +6-012-204-3201 | Skype: colincharles