We’ve all been through downtime at some point and deplore the lost work and productivity that comes with it. And the only thing worse than server downtime is having to report that downtime to frustrated customers who are depending on your service for their business.

Yesterday, AWS server issues meant downtime for highly trafficked sites Instagram, Vine, Airbnb, and IFTTTA. According to AWS’s health dashboard, the company’s North Virginia data center may be to blame.

The fact is, any cloud system is subject to outages, from Yahoo Mail to Microsoft BPOS and VMware; however, outages aren’t and shouldn’t be business as normal.

While we never wish for anyone to experience downtime, when stories like AWS hit the …

How can this be? I am shocked. I have looked at query plans, confirmed indexes, checked handler status variables after query execution to figure out what MySQL is up to, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with it. MySQL is using the right index, using ICP, Batched Key Access. Basically, everything that we can throw at it. I even tried MariaDB and it used the new Batched Hash Join. Same result. Postgres is done in 150ms and MySQL 5.6 takes 3s!

We had a customer who was migrating from Postgres to MySQL approach us about a slow running query. Here’s the situation. They have a fleet of cars, which are loaned out to customers for short periods of time. The cars have sensors that report mileage periodically. They want to figure out which customer drove how many miles during a certain time period. Easy enough, right?

The cust_car table (25K rows) captures which customer had which car and what was the odometer reading when it was …

This week, we announced the launch of GenieDB cloud-hosted Globally Distributed MySQL-as-a-Service, our scalable, highly available database-as-a-service (DBaaS).

When I start recounting the many benefits of this new automated platform to build web-scale applications, I fear I might sound one of those late-night infomercials…

“But wait, if you act now, you’ll get all the amazing benefits of geographical database distribution, including: continuous availability during regional outages (whether datacenter or cloud failure, be it hurricane, earthquake or other natural disaster). And that’s not all! You also get better application response time for globally distributed users.”

While our product won’t melt away your waistline, serve as an amazing do-it-all “Omnitool,” or help you stop snoring, we get pretty fired up when we think about our customers who are …

Catching up on our reading today, we saw a blog post from Chris Stevens, the multi-faceted VP of Engineering at Traxo, technology consultant, and Full Stack developer. In his post, he notes some of the impressive new database technologies he’s seeing lately in tech blogs and on the conference circuit.

Chris says that when it makes sense he advises his clients to look at non-relational datatstores, but for a number of reasons he works with MySQL wherever possible. Many of his clients looking to run globally distributed applications often need to distribute the database across more than one data center (geo-distribution) for fault tolerance and localized performance.

“Globally distributed applications often require localized performance,” he said in his post. “We can do some work loading front-end assets from CDN …

A few years back, along with some folks at MySQL and in the open source community, we helped kick off a campaign against software patents in Europe.  This was a hot topic and surprisingly, it seemed no large companies were willing to step up the fight.  As a relatively young company, MySQL had a lot to lose if someone went on the attack against us using patents.  While we had a very small number of patents in our portfolio (mostly through acquisitions), we help them only for defensive purposes.  

It's been interesting to see some stories come out from NPR's Planet Money and This American Life shows that shed more light on software patents.  The …

Those who are familiar with me know I've a dream.

5 years ago I decided to leave a systems integrator where I was doing great. Why? I wanted to be in a company with the same growth prospects that Oracle had in the 80s. I dreamed to be in the Oracle of 30 years ago and, as time travel wasn't affordable, I decided to join MySQL AB to help expand the business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
A few years later my dream came true, but in a slightly different sense. Sun acquired MySQL and was later swallowed by Oracle giving me the opportunity to join the company I wished I could have helped build.

Oracle is an amazing …

Take 50% Off COLLABORATE 13 Now Through Wednesday But you’ve got to act fast! If you’re not already one of the many joining the IOUG at COLLABORATE 13 – IOUG Forum, sign up today for your chance at attending for … Continue reading →

Standard MySQL is configurable such that a single master server can be clustered with a number of read-only slave servers. To enable this master-slave replication, master’s transaction logs are communicated to the slaves (log shipping). Log shipping is a form of asynchronous replication. Under this configuration, the data on the slave always remains behind the master, a condition referred to as slave lag or replication lag. The extent of the slave lag depends on workload, network bandwidth and network latency. Database reads can be served out of the slaves, assuming the application has been designed to tolerate the slave lag and requisite staleness of data (eventual consistency), which can at times be variable and opaque. MySQL master-slave replication offers the possibility of promoting a slave to become the new master should the master fail, but this is very painful to do in practice. The cluster has to stop taking ANY writes while it waits for …

The next Helsinki MySQL User Group is set for Tuesday, February 19. Lari Pulkkinen from Arbitron Mobile will talk about their project adopting SSD disks for better MySQL performance. Yes, there are benchmarks included.

Note the changed location: Oracle office in Gräsantörmä 2, Espoo. We are glad to have Oracle Finland sponsoring the user group by taking turns as meetup host. Food and sauna will be available after the talk as is customary.

More details and signup at Meetup.com.

Wow! We at GenieDB have been working on a geo-distributed, multi-datacenter, relational database engine for some time. We’ve believed in this vision of providing distributed RDBMS/SQL database, but had to endure the NoSQL movement and other attempts at refuting the need for such a thing. One whitepaper and what a big difference it makes!

The Spanner whitepaper does just as good a job as any marketing speak of describing what we are after. “Even though many projects happily use Bigtable, we have also consistently received complaints from users that Bigtable can be difficult to use for some kinds of applications: those that have complex, evolving schemas, or those that want strong consistency in the presence of wide-area replication. … …