AMS DB October meetup

About this event

The October event will be hosted by the MySQL team at Oracle. Program: • 17:45 \- Doors open / refreshments / drinks • 18:00-18:05 \- Welcome • 18:05-18:55 - The Path to MySQL Open Innovation \- Heather VanCura • 18:55-19:00 \- Short break • 19:00-19:50 \- MySQL Clone Plugin Deep\-dive \- Matthias Crauwels • 19:50-20:00 \- Q&A / discussion / networking • 20:00 \- End of meetup\, with a possible external social gathering afterwards The Path to MySQL Open Innovation Abstract: As the MySQL Community celebrates its 30-year milestone in 2025–2026, it reaches a defining moment in its evolution. Looking ahead, the community enters a new phase focused on expanding engagement, collaboration, contributions, and the pace of innovation. Oracle and the MySQL Community are embarking on a bold transformation—reimagining how one of the world's most widely used open-source databases is built, governed, and evolved. This session shares details on the next phase of that transformation following the MySQL 9.7 Community Edition release. Sparked by direct community feedback about the future of MySQL as an open ecosystem, this journey led to a multi-phase strategy to modernize MySQL's development model. About Heather VanCura: Heather VanCura serves as Vice President of External Standards & Community Engagement at Oracle, where she leads global strategy for Oracle's participation in formal and informal standards organizations and engagement in open-source projects worldwide. She also leads Oracle's MySQL community engagement initiatives, fostering relationships with developers, user groups, and open-source contributors around the world. With extensive experience in community building, open governance, and developer relations, Heather focuses on advancing MySQL through open collaboration, modern development practices, and ecosystem growth. Her work strengthens connections between Oracle engineering teams and the global MySQL community, supporting open participation, greater transparency, and contributions that help shape the future of data platforms. She helps ensure that MySQL continues to evolve as the world's leading open-source database. MySQL Clone Plugin Deep-dive Abstract: Everyone knows the syntax: CLONE INSTANCE FROM ..., wait a bit, and you have a new replica. Far fewer people know what happens underneath, and that is where the interesting engineering is. Copying a multi-terabyte data directory takes minutes to hours, and the database keeps changing the whole time. So what exactly did you copy? Clone's answer is a three-stage protocol built inside InnoDB: a bulk file copy that is knowingly inconsistent, a page copy that repairs what changed underneath it, and a redo tail that pins the whole thing to a single LSN. On first start the result is just ordinary crash recovery. In this talk I walk through that protocol and the two pieces of infrastructure it needed: modified-page tracking and redo archiving, both of which outlived clone itself. Along the way we look at the design tradeoffs the worklogs spell out: why pages are tracked at flush time rather than when they are dirtied, what the donor actually pays for while a clone runs, what happens when the redo archiver falls behind, and how binlog position and GTID end up consistent with the copied data. I don't write InnoDB, I operate it. This is a practitioner's reading of the code and the worklogs, aimed at anyone who provisions replicas and wants to know what they are trusting. About Matthias Crauwels Passionate about computers since the age of 10, he got his computer science degree in 2005. He worked at a major Belgian university developing e-learning applications, where he grew into the role of MySQL DBA. In 2017 he left the university and joined Pythian as a MySQL Database Consultant. Today he works at PlanetScale supporting large enterprise customers running MySQL at scale.