Xaprb

I was curious what information MariaDB’s “phone home” user feedback plugin sends. (It works on more than just MariaDB, by the way.)

It’s easy enough to find out: just load the plugin, then select from the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.FEEDBACK table. This returns a lot of rows that are obviously the status counters and variables, as well as the plugins loaded in the server. A quick exclusion join will eliminate those, and the result on my laptop is this:

select f.* from feedback as f
   left outer join global_variables as v on f.variable_name = v.variable_name
   left outer join global_status    as s on f.variable_name = s.variable_name
   left outer join plugins          as p on f.variable_name = p.plugin_name
where s.variable_name is null and v.variable_name is null and p.plugin_name is null;
+--------------------+--------------------------------------+
| VARIABLE_NAME      | VARIABLE_VALUE                       |
+--------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Cpu_count          | 2                                    |
| Mem_total          | 4186529792                           |
| Uname_sysname      | Linux                                |
| Uname_release      | 2.6.41.1-1.fc15.i686.PAE             |
| Uname_version      | #1 SMP Fri Nov 11 21:43:42 UTC 2011  |
| Uname_machine      | i686                                 |
| Uname_distribution | fedora: Fedora release 15 (Lovelock) |
+--------------------+--------------------------------------+

This actually isn’t all, though. If you check the output of SHOW VARIABLES you’ll see an extra few rows, one of which is this:

+---------------------+------------------------------+
| Variable_name       | Value                        |
+---------------------+------------------------------+
| feedback_server_uid | xlGYjFKJ0ivpSWAktGglpEgVTq8= |
+---------------------+------------------------------+

I’ll have to look into how that’s calculated. It might be useful.

It’s notoriously hard to measure the usage of open-source software. Software that’s open-source or free can be redistributed far and wide, so the original creators have no idea how many times it’s installed, deployed, or distributed. As a proxy, we often use downloads, but that’s woefully inadequate.

I’ve recently begun trying to figure out how many job openings are mentioning various open-source projects. I think that this might be a better metric because it’s driven by the end result (usage), rather than intermediate processes (downloads, etc). I think that it’s likely that usage and demand for skilled people is somewhat realistically related.

To be more concrete, I’ve been watching RSS feeds from job posting aggregators for several alternative versions of MySQL: Percona Server, MariaDB, and Drizzle. It appears that Percona Server is by far the most in-demand in terms of job skills. (I haven’t seen a job posting for the others at all, so far.)

On the other hand, my sample is skewed; I think Percona Server is better known in America, but MariaDB might be more visible in Europe. And I’m not sure that the sample data set is large enough to be statistically significant. Percona Server jobs are utterly dwarfed by MySQL jobs.

There are other flaws in my method: some software doesn’t really need as much manpower to run as others. I would say that given an equal number of WordPress and Drupal websites, more of the Drupal websites are going to be trying to hire experts to manage their sites. So nothing is apples to apples.

What do you think about this metric and its merits or drawbacks? Is there a better way to figure out how much adoption a project really has?

O’Reilly’s 2011 edition of the MySQL conference has an expanded agenda, with good representation from Postgres, CouchDB, MongoDB, and others. Take a look at the full schedule listing, which is being filled out as talks are approved and the speakers verify that they’ll give the session.

I am certainly looking forward to this year’s event. A tremendous amount of progress has landed in GA versions of open-source databases this year. To name just a couple, there’s a new version of Postgres (9.0) with built-in replication and many more improvements; there’s MySQL 5.5 GA; there’s the HandlerSocket NoSQL interface to MySQL; Drizzle has a beta release; and the list goes on. I believe that this conference will have balanced and representative coverage of what’s really important to users. It isn’t dominated by any vendor this year; O’Reilly is running the conference independently, and the committee members represent a broad spectrum of databases themselves.

In short, I am happier than I’ve ever been about this great and unique conference. It’s definitely going to be the best year so far. Thank you O’Reilly for holding it, and thank you to all the great speakers, and thanks to all the companies who sponsor the event.