Enhancing MySQL: MySQL improvement project (opens in new tab)

One of the big problems is Oracle decide what does/doesn’t go in. Understandable, but they provide no insight into the decision making process, why patches don’t get merged, or even if/when they take it. They used to post worklogs for features they were working on which gave some insights, but they’ve stopped doing that now too. Imagine working on a new feature for months, submitting a patch only to find out oracle have went their own route, many people will just say what’s the point. Last updated work log was in 2021: https://dev.mysql.com/worklog/

Edit: As an example, one of the optimizations called out in this repo was submitted in October 2023. “Thank you for the report and contribution.” and then radio silence ever since.

https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=112737 https://www.percona.com/blog/what-oracle-missed-we-fixed-mor...

From FAQ:

16. Why aren't these improvements merged into the official MySQL?

Optimizations have been recommended to the official team and have received acknowledgment. However, they are assigned low priority in official bug fixes. Simple optimizations may take considerable time to be integrated, while complex ones might never be implemented.

As a result, the decision was made to open-source the MySQL optimized version to ensure effective application in high-end scenarios.

Keep in mind optimization effects can be counter-intuitive, as you need to consider unexpected second-order effects. Say what if my queries being slow forced me into optimizing them via cache that I wouldn't use otherwise, resulting in 10x improvement, but if MySQL is a bit faster I would've reached my initial performance goals without that cache, thus increasing the total carbon footprint?

And if this sounds contrived, this is basically what happened with our hardware vs. software optimization situation. We could do wonders on a 1MHz chip with 2MB of RAM in the 1980s, but now we need literally many thousands of times that capacity just to boot our OS to an empty screen.

Every time hardware improved, software bloated up. Thus eventually we had so much disposable compute just for... again, literally... playing games and crypto scams, that we invented AI running on it. And now that AI is once again blowing up our energy needs.

All that, because hardware kept optimizing, software kept compensating by becoming worse, and thus new use cases revealed themselves that would be impossible before, but rather destructive to climate.

>Maybe these optimizations can let me avoid moving to Vitess for another year!

Any reason why considering Vitess isn't exactly new and has been stable enough? Other than no need to introduce additional complexity unless absolutely necessary.

Was wondering the same. Such a verbose readme and not a single mention of MariaDB.

I know it's moving slower and in a lot of ways it's inferior to mysql, but at the same time that would make it even better to have some contributions like this.

https://github.com/google/mysql-tools/tree/master/old/mysql-... - Google used to do that too

MySQL is available in GitHub (so in that sense hosted) but development doesn’t happen there. Not saying that’s the reason for the delivery mechanism though.

He is actually quite active on X, and writing his book [1] on the journey. I actually enjoy his insights too many time than I'd want.

[1] https://github.com/enhancedformysql/The-Art-of-Problem-Solvi...

Field-level is just column privileges. Row-level, I think you can only achieve that with views, which is less than ideal.

Views?

There should be a blog post to point to people who have a 1990s view of MySQL. It has changed a lot and has most of PostgreSQL's feature set while being faster and simpler to use for the average user.

> Do they have stored procedures yet?

MySQL has supported Stored Procedures since version 5.

That was 20 years ago.

No offense but I'm always curious about how people solidify easily verifiable missinformation as facts. I'm assuming most spread it out of ignorance, not malice.