I’ve been posting quite a bit about Docker as I’ve been working with it a lot as of late. I thought I would share something interesting I discovered a couple weeks ago while working on setting up a Docker container-based lab environment for training purposes here at Pythian, specifically when attempting to install the MySQL-python package inside the container.

I know what you’re thinking: why is he trying to install a package in a Docker container? Doesn’t that go against the “Docker run and forget about it” philosophy? Sure, but in this case, I’m looking to add orchestration via ansible, which I don’t think is completely out of the question in order to coordinate your Docker containers for something like replication. This requires using the …

Please join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles on Tuesday, June 26th, 2018, as he presents MariaDB Server 10.3 at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

MariaDB Server 10.3 is out. It has some interesting features around system versioned tables, Oracle compatibility, column compression, an integrated SPIDER engine, as well as MyRocks. Learn about what’s new, how you can use it, and how it is different from MySQL.

Register Now

Colin Charles Chief Evangelist

Colin Charles is the Chief Evangelist at Percona. He was previously on the founding team of MariaDB Server in 2009, and had …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

This is a short working week for me due to a family emergency. It caused me to skip speaking at DataOps.Barcelona and miss hanging out with the awesome of speakers and attendees. This is the first time I’ve missed a scheduled talk, and I received many messages about my absence. I am sure we will all meet again soon.

One of the talks I was planning to give at DataOps.Barcelona will be available as a Percona webinar next week: Securing Your Database Servers from External Attacks on Thursday, …

Serverless is a new buzzword in the database industry. Even though it gets tossed around often, there is some confusion about what it really means and how it really works. Serverless architectures rely on third-party Backend as a Service (BaaS) services. They can also include custom code that is run in managed, ephemeral containers on a Functions as a Service (FaaS) platform. In comparison to traditional Platform as a Service (PaaS) server architecture, where you pay a predetermined sum for your instances, serverless applications benefit from reduced costs of operations and lower complexity. They are also considered to be more agile, allowing for reduced engineering efforts.

In reality, there are still servers in a serverless architecture: they are just being used, managed, and maintained outside of the application. But isn’t that a lot like what cloud providers, such as Amazon RDS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, are already …

MariaDB DBAs are accountable for auditing database infrastructure operations to proactively troubleshoot performance and operational issues, MariaDB Audit Plugin is capable of auditing the database operations of both MariaDB and MySQL. MariaDB Audit Plugin is provided as a dynamic library: server_audit.so (server_audit.dll for Windows).  The plugin must be located in the plugin directory, the directory containing all plugin libraries for MariaDB.

MariaDB [(none)]> select @@plugin_dir; 
+--------------------------+
| @@plugin_dir             |
+--------------------------+
| /usr/lib64/mysql/plugin/ |
+--------------------------+
1 row in set (0.000 sec)

There are two ways you can install MariaDB Audit Plugin:

INSTALL SONAME statement while logged into MariaDB, You need to use administrative account which has INSERT privilege for the mysql.plugin table.

MariaDB [(none)]> INSTALL SONAME 'server_audit'; …

Sequences are used to requesting unique values on demand, The best use case of sequences is to have a unique ID. , that can be used across multiple tables. In some cases sequences are really helpful to have an identifier before an actual row is inserted. With the normal way of having an automatically incrementing identifier, the identifier value will only be available after insert of the row and the identifier will only be unique inside its own table. MariaDB Server 10.3 follows the standard and includes compatibility with the way Oracle does sequences introduced in Oracle Database Server on top of the standard.

Simple steps to create a sequence in MariaDB 10.3 onwards, a create statement is used:

MariaDB [MDB101]> CREATE SEQUENCE Seq1_100
    -> START WITH 100
    -> INCREMENT BY 1;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.015 sec)

This creates a sequence that starts at 100 and is incremented with 1 every time a …

The MySQL error log is an essential part of database server performance monitoring. Whenever something goes wrong or performance degrades, the Error Logs are usually the first place we look to start troubleshooting.

The MySQL Error Log is one of three related log types:

• The Error Log: It contains information about errors that occur while the server is running (as well as server start and stop events).
• The General Query Log: This is a general record of what mysqld is doing (connect, disconnect, queries).
• The Slow Query Log: It consists of “slow” SQL statements as defined in the long_query_time global variable.

You can enable error log monitoring to allow Monyog to keep an eye on your MySQL Error Log, and notify you when something goes awry. Moreover, Monyog combines the General Query, Slow Query and Error logs in a single view for both network and cloud servers. For example, in the …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Some big news out from Microsoft about their acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion. GitHub hosts many projects, including from the MySQL ecosystem, but maybe more interesting is that their DBA team is awesome, give great talks, and are generally prolific writers. Some of the cool tools the MySQL world has gotten thanks to the excellent team include (but are not limited to): ccql, gh-ost for triggerless online schema migrations, and Orchestrator which is a GUI-based High Availability and …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Shortly after the last dispatch, I jetted off for a spot of vacation (which really meant I was checking out the hype behind Blockchain with a database developer lens at the Blockchain Week NYC), and then some customer visits in Seoul, which explains the short hiatus. Here’s to making this more regular as the summer approaches.

I am about to embark on a fairly long trip, covering a few upcoming appearances: Lisbon for the Percona Engineering meeting, SouthEastLinuxFest in Charlotte, the …

Some years ago, Peter Z wrote a blogpost about using MySQL Sandbox to deploy multiple server versions. Last February, Giuseppe  introduced us to its successor: dbdeployer. In this blogpost we will demonstrate how to use it. There is a lot of information in Giuseppe’s post, so head there if you want a deeper dive.

First step is to install it, which is really easy to do now since it’s developed in Go, and standalone executables are provided. You can get the latest version …