At the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference, the MySQL Community announced Alibaba Cloud as the sole winner of the 2018 MySQL Community Awards, Corporate Contributor. The Corporate Contributor award recognizes the contribution of large enterprises and has been given to GitHub, Facebook, Oracle, and WebScaleSQL, a collaboration among Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Alibaba.
Peng Lixun (right-most person in the front row) receives the award on behalf of Alibaba Cloud's ApsaraDB for RDS team.
The award recognizes Alibaba Cloud's longtime contribution of patches and ideas to the open source communities and its efforts to help the MySQL Community and other open source communities improve MySQL, publish the source code for AliSQL and the related backup tool AliXtrabackup, and invest in MariaDB to protect the MySQL ecosystem. This announcement marks the first time the MySQL Community Awards has been given to a Chinese company since it was founded in 2005.
In this article, we will be briefly sharing the contributions of Alibaba Cloud to the MySQL community. The following patches and ideas may sound familiar to you, or they are features running on anApsaraDB for RDS instance to address your service needs.
Multiple Source Replication
Multiple source replication is developed upon MySQL's unidirectional one-to-many replication based on binary logs. It allows data to be aggregated and split freely on multiple nodes by means of many-to-many replication between nodes.
Multiple source replication is included by MySQL and officially released in MySQL 5.7.6.
FlashBack
FlashBack implements custom logical rollback based on binary logs to mitigate the impact of misoperation in MySQL and reduce O&M risks.
FlashBack can be used in the public cloud Alibaba Cloud RDS MySQL. It has been released in MariaDB 10.3 of the community version.
Sequence
Compatible with the syntax for Oracle, SQL Server, and other databases, sequence is an AliSQL-specific method to obtain monotonically increasing unique values in simple mode. You can experience Sequence
in the public cloud RDS MySQL or download the AliSQL open source version. Sequence is also included in MariaDB 10.3.
Column Compression
AliSQL provides a simple column-based COMPRESS syntax specific to text or JSON fields with a high compression rate,
which greatly saves space. Column compression is included in MariaDB.
Dynamic Column Addition
To address the issue of having to copy the entire table when adding fields for table structure change in MySQL, AliSQL designs a new record format "COMFORT" that allows you to only modify data dictionaries instead of records when adding fields
in a matter of several milliseconds. The source code for COMFORT is published in AliSQL.
Auto-Increment Column Value Persistence
The MySQL AUTO_INCREMENT field is used to generate auto-increment IDs, which are stored only in memory and lost upon system crash or restart. AliSQL implements auto-increment column value persistence using the reserved bits in table SEGMENT HEADER
to prevent column value loss for instances created in Alibaba Cloud RDS MySQL. This feature is included in MariaDB 10.3.
Optimized SemiSync
SemiSync's plugin method is statically compiled and optimized for at least 10% performance boost.
Hundreds of Patches for InnoDB Bug Fixing and Optimization
AliSQL extensively optimized InnoDB, a storage engine for MySQL, including double log buffer, transaction lock, and independent log writer thread.
The optimizations greatly improved InnoDB's performance and many are included in official releases of MySQL and its other branches.
Cross-Engine Backup
An active community embracer and a multi-engine supporter, AliSQL develops a single-instance, multi-engine online backup solution rooted in practical application and O&M, with the source code published in the AliSQLBackup project.
Benefits of the solution also spread to other branches.
Alibaba Cloud and the Open Source Community
AliSQL develops and makes available many functions to public cloud users while actively publishing the source code. Most of the functions are included in official releases of MySQL, MariaDB, or Percona. Alibaba Cloud contributes to the open source communities in the spirits of embracing, giving back, integrating, and reciprocating.
Alibaba Cloud is an active contributor in the open source community. To learn more about Alibaba Cloud's open source initiatives, check out these 12 open source projects.
