With the motivation from today’s public news on Twitter’s move from MySQL to Cassandra, my own skills desire following in-depth discussions at last November’s Open SQL Camp to consider Cassandra and yesterday’s discussion with a new client on persistent key-value store products, today I download installed and configured for the first time. Not that today’s news was unexpected, if you follow the Twitter Engineering Open Source projects you would have seen Cassandra as well as other products being used or evaluated by Twitter.

So I went from nothing to a …

I say correct because there are several incorrect approaches to managing MySQL logs. In MySQL you have two important log files, the MySQL error log (configured with –log-error) and the MySQL slow query log (configured with –log-slow-queries or –slow-query-log and –slow-query-log-file which is available …

I’ve heard that the mechanic’s wife always has a car that needs repair or tuneup, the painter’s wife always had walls of peeling paint, you get the picture. What about MySQL DBA’s and their own databases? While I have many versions of MySQL for testing including for example the latest 5.1.44 which I was using for my previous post, what is running on my production server? Let’s see:

mysql> select version();
+-----------+
| version() |
+-----------+
| 5.1.25-rc |
+-----------+

That’s really old. And yes, to prove my point that we can be our own worst enemy, the previous version before 5.1.25 was 5.1.6. Yes, .6 which worked just fine, and never crashed once for my 20+ websites. While I have downloaded onto my production server several versions ready for upgrade including versions 5.1.30, 5.1,38, and 5.4.1 I’ve never actually gone through the upgrade process.

Continuing on from preparation in our MySQL latin1 to utf8 migration let us first understand where MySQL uses character sets. MySQL defines the character set at 4 different levels for the structure of data.

• Instance
• Schema
• Table
• Column

In MySQL 5.1, the default character set is latin1. If not specified, this is what you will get. For example.

mysql> create table test1(c1 varchar(10) not null);
mysql> show create table test1\G
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `test1` (
  `c1` varchar(10) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

If you want all tables in your instance to always be a default of utf8, you can changed the server variable character_set_server. This can be set dynamically.

mysql> set global …

I sound like a broken record with every client when I talk to about the resilience of their production environments. It’s very simple in theory, however in practice many organizations fail.

Ask yourself these checklist questions for your MySQL backup and recovery process?

1. Do you have MySQL backups in place?
2. Do you backup ALL your MySQL data?
3. Do you have consistent MySQL backups?
4. Do you have backups that include both static snapshot and point in time transactions?
5. Do you review your backup logs EVERY SINGLE day or have tested backup monitoring in place?
6. Do you perform a test recovery of your static backup?
7. Do you perform a test recovery to point in time?
8. Do you time your backup and recovery process and review over time?
9. Do you have off-site copies of your backups?
10. Do you backup your primary binary logs?
…

At the recent FOSDEM 2010 event, I presented in my keynote Dolphins, now and beyond a option which I termed the “Blue Pill” or the “Red Pill”. The following slide produced noticed interest in a packed room, and subsequent conversation.

While the ownership of MySQL has changed, the option between MySQL and Oracle as a product for use still remains. While MySQL is the most popular for modern online applications, Oracle continues to have the widely used enterprise database product and has a large number of Oracle DBAs in the IT marketplace.

Over the past 5 years I have presented a number of topics on MySQL for Oracle DBA’s. At the upcoming MySQL Users Conference 2010 I will be presenting …

Before undertaking such migration the first step is a lesson in understanding more about how latin1 and utf8 work and interact in MySQL. latin1 in a common and historical character set used in MySQL. utf8 (first available in MySQL Version 4.1) is an encoding supporting multiple bytes and is the system default in MySQL 5.0

• latin1 is a single byte character set.
• utf8 is a 1-3 byte character set depending on the size of the character. NOTE: MySQL utf8 does not support the RFC 3629 4 byte sequences

MySQL variables

MySQL has a number of different system variables to consider, the following is the default representation in MySQL 5.1

mysql> show global variables like '%char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value …

Kristian Nielsen presented “Beyond MySQL GA: patches, storage engines, forks, and pre-releases”.
This included a history of current products:

Google Patches (5.0 & 5.1) included improvements in :

• statistics/monitoring
• lock contention
• binlog
• malloc()
• filesorts
• innodb I/O and wait statistics
• SHOW …STATISTICS statements
• smp scalability
• I/O scalability
• semisync replication
• many more

Percona Patches (5.0) focus on

• statistics/monitoring
• performance/scalability
• buffer pool content/mutexes
• microslow patch

These have been ported to 5.1 and mainly integrated into XtraDB.

EBay Patches (5.0) have included:

• variable length memory storage engine
• pool of …

The next presentation by Piotr Biel from Percona was on Multi-Master Manager for MySQL.

The introduction included a discussion of the popular MySQL HA solutions including:

• MySQL Master-slave replication with failover
• MMM managed bi-directional replication
• Heartbeat/SAN
• Heartbeat/DRBD
• NDB Cluster

A key problem that was clarified in the talk is the discussion of Multi-Master and this IS NOT master-master. You only write to a single node. With MySQL is this critical because MySQL replication does not manage collision detection.

The MMM Cluster Elements are:

• monitoring node
• database nodes

And the Application Components are:

• mon
• agent
• angel

MMM works with 3 layers.

• Network Layer – uses a virtual IP address, related to servers, not …

The slides for my presentation at FOSDEM 2010 are now available online at slideshare. In this presentation I describe a successful client implementation with the result of 10x performance improvements. My presentation covers monitoring, reviewing and analyzing SQL, the art of indexes, improving SQL, storage engines and caching.

The end result was a page load improvement from 700+ms load time to a a consistent 60ms.

10x Performance Improvements – A Case Study View more presentations from Ronald Bradford.