High availability is about more than just making sure that applications can get to your data, even if there is a failure:

How about when you are upgrading your database schema What if you need to add memory to a database server or reconfigure/restart MySQL If your apps want to read data from a MySQL slave, how can you be sure they are not reading stale data without re-coding your apps What

There has been a lot of talk about MySQL 5.6 replication improvements. With few exceptions, what I have seen was either marketing messages or hearsay. This means that few people have really tried out the new features to see whether they meet the users needs.

As usual, I did try the new version in my environment. I like to form my own opinion based on experiments, and so I have been trying out these features since they have appeared in early milestones.

What follows is a list of (potentially) surprising results that you may get when using MySQL 5.6.
All the examples are made using MySQL 5.6.6.

Gotcha #1 : too much noise

I have already mentioned that MySQL 5.6 is too verbose when creating data directory. This also means that your error log may have way more information than you'd like to get. …

I recently released a new version of the Bazaar plugin for Jenkins. This release was inspired by a problem we noticed at Percona. It is:

• run “bzr revert” after a pull, as if you have a directory that is removed and re-added while having unknown files in said directory (e.g. build artifacts), you would end up in a very bad place (this is a BZR bug, so we work-around it with a “bzr revert”).

The update has already appeared in the Jenkins update centre, so you should already be able to upgrade to it.

From the desk of your new Bazaar plugin for Jenkins maintainer, I give you Version 1.18.

This release has two good bug fixes:

• UI fix for checkout option (JENKINS-12261)
• Auto-recover from corrupt BZR branches (e.g. bzr branch/checkout killed at inopportune moment) by cleaning the workspace and trying again (this is now default behaviour, best used with the Jenkins SCM retry count feature being > 1)

We’ve been running the same code as this release at Percona for about 2 months now (the second bugfix was one I wanted to test first before submitting upstream). This is the big fix that fixed all our problems with using bazaar with Jenkins in a large deployment.

The other news? I’m now maintainer, and this is my first release.

The page on the Jenkins wiki is here:

• …

For Drizzle and for all of the projects we work on at Percona we use the Bazaar revision control system (largely because it’s what we were using at MySQL and it’s what MySQL still uses). We also use Jenkins.

We have a lot of jobs in our Jenkins. A lot. We build upstream MySQL 5.1, 5.5 and 5.6, Percona Server 5.1, Percona Server 5.5, XtraBackup 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1. For each of these we also have the normal trunk builds as well as parameterised ones that allow a developer to test out a tree before they ask for it to be merged. We also have each of these products across seven operating systems and for each of those both x86 32bit and 64bit. If we weren’t already in the hundreds of jobs, we certainly are once you multiply out between release and debug and XtraBackup being across so many MySQL and Percona …

Since I have been discussing scripting lately I thought I would continue with another topic I touched on briefly - backups.

I have written and modified the following script over the last few years. I have used it (and continue to use it) with multiple clients. It uses Percona's Xtrabackup to take the backup (although it can be easily modified to use mysqldump instead).

First the script

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#!/bin/bash
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$""
day_of_week=`date +%a`
backup_dir=/mysql-backup/
logfile=/root/backup_log.txt
report=/tmp/report.txt
servername=slave1
email=bmurphy@paragon-cs.com
password=`cat /root/.ssh/.backup_password`

# run backup
echo ' ' > $report
echo 'The backup is now beginning:' >> $report
echo ' ' …

The best (and truly the only) MySQL multi-master, multi-site solution on the market gets even better! Continuent is happy to announce immediate availability of Continuent Tungsten 1.5.New Continuent Tungsten 1.5 allows you to build multi-site, disaster recovery (DR) and multi-master solutions with ease:

Multi-Master Operations - Tungsten can support your multi-master operations today by linking

You could say: what could be the reason for having really big number of tables? Just design the application properly! It’s not always that easy. And this post isn’t really about arguing whether having many tables is good or not, it’s about what happens in terms of memory usage if you already reached that point.

Btw what do I mean by *many*? From my experience it’s tens of thousends or even millions rather than hundreds.

The inspiration for me to write this post was strong desire to try out the latest declared improvements in that area announced to be done in MySQL 5.6. _1

What I did was a very simple test where I loaded sql dump of databases and tables definitions only into different versions of MySQL. During the load time I was monitoring memory usage of mysqld process (RSS …

We are excited to have Gerry Narvaja start today at Tokutek! Gerry has spent more than 25 years in the software industry, most of them working with databases for different kinds of applications, from embedded to large-scale web products. Gerry worked first at MySQL, and then Sun Microsystems supporting the Sales teams. In 2008 he transitioned into being a Senior MySQL DBA. Gerry graduated as an Electronic Engineer from I.T.B.A (Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires) and has an M.B.A. from Universidad del Salvador in collaboration with S.U.N.Y.A (State University of NY at Albany).

Gerry enjoys helping users to solve complex database production issues. For almost a year he has been co-hosting the popular MySQL Community podcast, OurSQL, which was given the …

In April, I got to give a talk at Percona Live, about why The Right Read Optimization is Actually Write Optimization. It was my first industry talk, so I was delighted when someone in the audience said “I feel like I just earned a college credit.”

Box offered to host everyone’s slides from the conference here (mine is here). A big thanks from me to Sheeri Cabral, for recording my talk and posting it online!

The focus of the talk …