Labs releases are intended to provide early access to new features. As Gopal notes in his recent blog post About the Data Dictionary Labs Release, there is a notable restriction where upgrading from any previous MySQL database version is not supported.

Today, I thought I would demonstrate how to get the data dictionary lab up and running on a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 installation:

# Download from labs.mysql.com
wget http://downloads.mysql.com/snapshots/pb/mysql-5.7.5-labs-dd/mysql-5.7.5-labs-dd-linux-el6-x86_64.tar.gz

# extract it to /usr/local/mysql
# more or less following instructions in INSTALL-BINARY

groupadd mysql
useradd -r -g mysql mysql
 
tar -xzf mysql-5.7.5-labs-dd-linux-el6-x86_64.tar.gz
mv mysql-5.7.5-labs-dd-linux-el6-x86_64 /usr/local/
ln -s /usr/local/mysql-5.7.5-labs-dd-linux-el6-x86_64 …

September 9, 2014 By Severalnines

We are excited to announce the availability of YUM/APT repositories for ClusterControl, making new releases of ClusterControl  easily accessible using YUM or APT package managers. The repo is found at http://repo.severalnines.com, with instructions provided on the landing page. Our Cluster Configurators will be using these repositories. As a result, users upgrading from s9s_upgrade_cmon starting from version v.1.2.8 will be configured with the package repository.

ClusterControl requires extra post-installation setup steps, such as generating an API token, configuring cmon/dcps database schema, grant privileges on cmon schema, setting up SSL and so on. We provide a post-installation script for this purpose at [Apache document …

As MySQL 5.6 now enables the SQL Mode STRICT_TRANS_TABLES for new installations, I have been running into users who have been upgrading from previous versions, and not quite sure how to test their application for compatibility with this new default.

For some applications converting warnings to errors presents an unknown-unknown, in that the operators of the system can not easily detect what may break. Certainly many deployments will have QA environments, but there is always some fear production queries are just a little bit different.

Since sql_mode is configurable on a per-session basis, there are some strategies that I have been recommending to ease transition:

• Whitelist: Have all new application components enable strict mode by default. For example, if you are building a set of cron jobs to rebuild caches of data …

September 1, 2014 By Severalnines

According to Forrester, a DBA in a large enterprise manages between 8 and 275 databases, with the industry average being 40 databases to a DBA. Larger databases usually require extra effort around tuning, backup, recovery and upgrade. Cloud, as well as automation and management tools can help improve the number of databases managed by one DBA.  

With that background, we were pretty excited to introduce support for management of single-instance MySQL and MariaDB databases in ClusterControl 1.2.6. The majority, if not all of the cluster users out there, use single-instance or master-slave replicated setups along their mission-critical …

August 18, 2014 By Severalnines

There are several ways to get ClusterControl installed on your database infrastructure, as described in the ClusterControl Quick Start Guide. One simple way is to use an installation script, install-cc.sh. This script automates the whole process, and is executed on the host where you want to install ClusterControl. By default, it assumes the host has internet connectivity during the installation process.

For users who are not able to have their ClusterControl hosts connect to the Internet during the installation, we have some good news! The installer script now supports offline installations.

Requirements

Prior to the offline …

I have been building a CloudFormation template for MySQL Fabric as an experiment to kick the tyres and further my understanding of how it all works.

For those not familiar, CloudFormation is a way of representing a collection of Amazon Cloud resources (a "stack") into a static json file (a "template"). In my previous company, we managed our AWS account almost exclusively via CloudFormation, and there are two key advantages I see with managing resources via templates:

• It allows for all environments to be synchronized (dev/qa/production).
• It allows for very fast disaster recovery (you can very quickly pick up and restore in another region).

CloudFormation is also a great-fit for MySQL Fabric, since it can remove many of the essential bootstrap steps that come with building a distributed system. It took a bit of work, but I …

With Fabric's official GA release this week, I thought I would post a spin on how to setup a development environment loosely based on the Fabric Quick Start guide in the manual.

The notable change, is the use of MySQL Sandbox for bootstrapping each of the MySQL instances.

Step 1: Install the MySQL Utilities + Python Connector

In my case, I downloaded:

• mysql-utilities-1.4.3-osx10.7.dmg Mac OS X 10.7 (Architecture Independent), DMG Archive
• mysql-connector-python-1.2.2-osx10.7.dmg Mac OS X 10.7 (Architecture Independent), DMG Archive

The GUI install in both cases works as expected. Next, Next, …

A series of related discussions triggered by difficulty in setting passwords via scripts using the mysql command-line client when an account has an expired password caused me to look into the interaction between expired passwords and batch mode, and this blog post resulted.  I hope it’s a useful explanation of the behavior and the workaround to those troubled by it, and amplifies the excellent documentation in the user manual.

The ability to flag accounts as having expired passwords first appeared in MySQL 5.6, with further …

MySQL, the original brand, the one developed by the MySQL team at Oracle, is steadily evolving. You can feel it if you try every new release that comes out of the milestone release cycle. Or even if you don’t try all of them, just testing a release once in a while gives you something to think about.

The engineers at Oracle are trying hard to improve the defaults. If you are the out-of-the-box type, and just install the new version on top of the previous one, leaving the same setup in place, you may be up for a for a few surprises. It’s the marketing, see? They tell you that just by replacing your old MySQL (5.1 or 5.5) with MySQL 5.6 you get 30% to 70% performance improvement. Which happens to be true, not only because the server is better, but also because they have changed the defaults. However, this change in defaults may come with some serious consequences for the ones who …

Ubuntu 14.04 defaults to MySQL 5.5, but also has MySQL 5.6 available for installation from the universe archive. Installing 5.6 is as easy as specifying the version, apt-get install mysql-server-5.6:


root@ubuntu1404:~# apt-get install mysql-server-5.6
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libaio1 libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl libhtml-template-perl libmysqlclient18 libterm-readkey-perl mysql-client-5.6 mysql-client-core-5.6 mysql-common
mysql-common-5.6 mysql-server-core-5.6
Suggested packages:
libclone-perl libmldbm-perl libnet-daemon-perl libplrpc-perl libsql-statement-perl libipc-sharedcache-perl mailx tinyca
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libaio1 libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl libhtml-template-perl libmysqlclient18 libterm-readkey-perl …