Yesterday I was asked by a customer for the reason why he had failed to achieve scale with a state-of-the-art "shared-storage" cluster. "It's a scale-out to 4 servers, but with a shared disk. And I got, after tons of work and efforts, 130% throughput, not even close to the expected 400%" he said.

Well, scale-out cannot be achieved with a shared storage and the word "shared" is the key. Scale-out is done with absolutely nothing shared or a "shared-nothing" architecture. This what makes it linear and unlimited. Any shared resource, creates a tremendous burden on each and every database server in the cluster.

In a previous post, I identified database engine activities such as buffer management, locking, thread locks/semaphores, and recovery tasks - as the main bottleneck in the OLTP …

  Plug-in to Vegas The program focuses on key topics such as high availability, virtualization, security, business intelligence, Exadata, Cloud Computing and internals.  Recently added, we switched around the schedule to include the Thursday Deep Dive, Avoiding Downtime through the Maximum … Continue reading →

http://collaborate12.ioug.org   Double Down at COLLABORATE 12- The IOUG Forum with Two Ways to Save- and a Chance to Win! The user-driven Oracle event of the year is fast-approaching, and IOUG wants you to make youreducational experience a sure bet. Between … Continue reading →

I’m speaking at Percona Live, LinuxCon Europe, and linux.conf.au. And I just co-founded a new company.

I have a few busy weeks behind me, and even busier weeks ahead. If you’ve been wondering why recently I haven’t been updating this space too frequently, here’s why:

Yours truly and fellow ex-Linbiters Martin Loschwitz and Andreas Kurz have recently founded hastexo, an independent professional services organization focused on open-source high availability and disaster recovery. We are already offering both on-site and …

Red Hat’s $136m acquisition of open source storage vendor Gluster marks Red Hat’s biggest buy since JBoss and starts the fourth quarter with a very intersting deal. The acquisition is definitely good for Red Hat since it bolsters its Cloud Forms IaaS and OpenShift PaaS technology and strategy with storage, which is often the starting point for enterprise and service provider cloud computing deployments. The acquisition also gives Red Hat another weapon in its fight against VMware, Microsoft and others, including OpenStack, of which Gluster is a member (more on that further down). The deal is also good for Gluster given the sizeable price Red Hat is paying for the provider of open source, software-based, scale-out storage for unstructured data and also as validation of both open source and software in today’s IT and cloud computing storage.

…

A few weeks ago we announced the Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition, which helps eliminate manual configuration efforts and risks by providing a pre-installed, pre-configured and certified software stack including Oracle VM Server for x86, Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and MySQL Enterprise Edition.

On Tuesday August 23rd at 10.00 am PT, Oracle will be hosting an Oracle virtualization launch event.

If you’re based in the SF bay area, you’re …

A few weeks ago we announced the Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition, which helps eliminate manual configuration efforts and risks by providing a pre-installed, pre-configured and certified software stack including Oracle VM Server for x86, Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and MySQL Enterprise Edition.

On Tuesday August 23rd at 10.00 am PT, Oracle will be hosting an Oracle virtualization launch event.

If you’re based in the SF bay area, you’re …

With the fast growth of virtualized data centers, and companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, it's easy to forget how much is built on open-source components, aka commodity software.  In a very real way open-source has enabled the huge explosion of commodity hardware, the fast growth of the internet itself, and now the further acceleration through cloud services, cloud infrastructure, and virtualization of data centers.

Your typical internet stack and application now stands on the shoulders of tens of thousands of open source developers and projects.  Let's look at a few of them.

1. Operating System - Linux

The commodity hardware craze would never have happened without the help of an open-source operating system to run on it.  Linux is an old story now, nonetheless everything else stands on it's shoulders.

2. Multi-purpose Webserver - Apache

As of July …

Virtualizing all parts of today’s software infrastructure has become a priority for many. Creating a more flexible and dynamic environment with improved availability enables organizations to accelerate innovation, reduce time to market, cut costs and deliver higher uptime.

Databases have rarely been the first candidates for virtualization – mainly as a result of fears in consolidating such critical resources, and in I/O overhead that may have degraded service levels. However with improvements in hypervisor designs coupled with more powerful commodity server hardware and repeatable best practices, many of these concerns are rapidly diminishing.

It was in this context that we began development of the Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition, making the world’s leading web database radically simpler to deploy, manage, and support in a virtualized environment.

Along with the development team, we will be hosting a …

A customer rose a support case with a problem on his Master-Master set-up. The 2nd Master claims to have a problem:

master2> SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G
                ...
    Master_Log_File: master1-bin.000014
Read_Master_Log_Pos: 97975045
   Slave_IO_Running: No
  Slave_SQL_Running: Yes
Exec_Master_Log_Pos: 97975045
      Last_IO_Errno: 1236
      Last_IO_Error: Got fatal error 1236 from master when reading data from binary log:
                     'Client requested master to start replication from impossible position'

What has happened?

When we look at the actual Masters binary logs we see the following situation:

master1> SHOW BINARY LOGS;
+--------------------+-----------+
| Log_name           | File_size |
+--------------------+-----------+
| master1-bin.000013 |  68757710 |
| master1-bin.000014 |  97973131 |
| master1-bin.000015 |    626440 |
+--------------------+-----------+

That looks really odd: The Slave …