While at Percona Live this year I was reminded about ZFS and running MySQL on top of a ZFS-based storage platform.

Now I’m a big fan of ZFS (although sadly I don’t get to use it as much as I used to after I shutdown my home server farm), and I did a lot of different testing back while at MySQL to ensure that MySQL, InnoDB and ZFS worked correctly together.

Of course today we have a completely new range of ZFS compatible environments, not least of which are FreeBSD and ZFS on Linux, I think it’s time to revisit some of my original advice on using this combination.

Unfortunately the presentations and MySQL University sessions back then have all been taken down. But that doesn’t mean the advice is any less valid.

Some of the core advice for using InnoDB on ZFS:

• Configure a single InnoDB tablespace, rather than configuring multiple tablespaces …

Note: This post originally appeared as a post on my former employers site (inside.godaddy.com), and has since been removed. Reposting here to share the information.

We here at GoDaddy deploy our MySQL database servers with RAID 10 for performance and reliability. Supporting that, we utilize hardware RAID option with Dell branded PERC cards. These cards offer a write back cache to boost write performance. Writes are stored in memory on the RAID controller and then flushed to disk in order to improve performance. This provides a noticeable improvement in writes because from the OS perspective, a write is complete when it hits the cache, not the actual disk. Since data in the cache is volatile, that is, susceptible to power loss, there is also a battery that allows the cache to be preserved in the event of a power loss. This eliminates the possibility of data loss while preserving the speed benefits of a write cache.

There is …

One thing that gets tedious in the IT community and Oracle community is the penchant for Windows only solutions. While Microsoft does an excellent job in certain domains, I remain a loyal Apple customer. By the way, you can install Oracle Client software on Mac OS X and run SQL Developer against any Oracle Database server. You can even run MySQL Workbench and MySQL server natively on the Mac OS X platform, which creates a robust development platform and gives you more testing options with the MySQL monitor (the client software).

Notwithstanding, some Windows users appear to malign Apple and the Mac OS X on compatibility, but they don’t understand that it’s a derivative of the Research Unix, through BSD (Berkeley Software …

The Trusty Tahr is out with support for 5 years. Here are the first thoughts about it…

Stupid Browser comes up when searching “Appearance”

• Unity feels more responsive than ever, especially the Alt+Tab.
• New Desktop environments these days (also read as Cinnamon, GNOME Shell) take up a lot of RAM, I wanted to test 14.04’s unity, after few hours usage it too scooped up 320 MB worth of RAM… I expected better
• One thing that definitely annoyed me a lot – Everytime I pressed “Alt + D” (Firefox’s shortcut for address bar focus), the HUD used to come up after the address bar focus. Hence after each Alt+D, I had an “Escape key” following up. I hope Canonical listens to this, They might say “F6″ is an alternate shortcut …

If you use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), you are always given choices of AMIs (by default; there are plenty of other AMIs available for your base-os): Amazon Linux AMI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Server and Ubuntu. In terms of cost, the Amazon Linux AMI is the cheapest, followed by SUSE then RHEL. 

I use EC2 a lot for testing, and recently had to pay a “RHEL tax” as I needed to run a RHEL environment. For most uses I’m sure you can be satisfied by the Amazon Linux AMI. The last numbers suggest Amazon Linux is #2 in terms of usage on EC2.

Anyway, recently Amazon Linux AMI came out with the 2014.03 release (see release notes). You can install MySQL …

As any server farm scales out, it becomes increasingly difficult to Watch All The Things™. I’ve been watching the progress of LogStash+ElasticSearch+Kibana (also known as an ELK stack) for a while and gave it a go this weekend. The trick for me was wanting to run each element inside of a separate Docker container so that I have easily portable elements to scale out with.

A step back. What is Docker? Docker is a container (using LXC) around an application. In short, you install Docker, start a container using a base image (CentOS, Ubuntu, etc.) and then run the container, dropping you into a shell. From here, you configure your application, then save your container. You …

Over the past couple of years, several tools have come up to solve some of the long standing problems for developers, DBAs and operations teams. This list is no where near exhaustive and your mileage may vary.

These tools should let you get up and coding, saving your code to a central place.

I run (Mac/Windows), I need a Linux server to learn some of this cool stuff, right?

Not exactly. VirtualBox is a virtualization project for multiple platforms (Mac, Win, Linux, Solaris) that allows you to run a guest OS right from your laptop or desktop. There are repositories of images (alternative here) that you can use to get yourself going quickly, or you can provision your own.

I set up (cool open source package here) and now my team …

http://webscalesql.org/

yeah , big buzz around that one

So I decided to check the install process:

1. Clone the repo from

root@webscalesql-5.6.clean:[Mon Mar 31 11:37:11][~]$ cd /opt/
root@webscalesql-5.6.clean:[Mon Mar 31 11:37:15][/opt]$ mkdir installs
root@webscalesql-5.6.clean:[Mon Mar 31 11:37:17][/opt]$ cd installs/
root@webscalesql-5.6.clean:[Mon Mar 31 11:37:19][/opt/installs]$ git clone https://github.com/webscalesql/webscalesql-5.6.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /opt/installs/webscalesql-5.6/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 30397, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (12678/12678), done.
remote: Total 30397 (delta 18716), reused 27620 (delta 16936)
Receiving objects: 100% (30397/30397), 47.99 MiB | 460 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (18716/18716), done.

2. …

I needed to test the new server audit plug-in on latest MariaDB 10.0.9
More info about that handy plug in you may find here : http://www.skysql.com/downloads/mariadb-audit-plugin
Take a moment to read the info, along with that nice blog : http://www.skysql.com/blogs/ralf-gebhardt/activating-auditing-mariadb-and-mysql-5-minutes

In short:

root@mariadb-10.0.9:[Mon Mar 24 07:51:54][/tmp/]$ lftp http://ftp.igh.cnrs.fr/pub/mariadb/mariadb-10.0.9/yum/
cd ok, cwd=/pub/mariadb/mariadb-10.0.9/yum                                   
lftp ftp.igh.cnrs.fr:/pub/mariadb/mariadb-10.0.9/yum> bookmark add mariadb-10.0.9
lftp ftp.igh.cnrs.fr:/pub/mariadb/mariadb-10.0.9/yum> ls
drwxr-xr-x  --  ..                   
drwxr-xr-x            - …

While installing mysql-workbench-community-6.0.9 on Ubuntu 13.04 if you get below error.

root@Dell-XPS:/home/nilnandan/Downloads# dpkg -i mysql-workbench-community-6.0.9-1ubu1204-amd64.deb
Selecting previously unselected package mysql-workbench-community.
(Reading database … 203112 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking mysql-workbench-community (from mysql-workbench-community-6.0.9-1ubu1204-amd64.deb) …
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of mysql-workbench-community:
 mysql-workbench-community depends on libctemplate0; however:
  Package libctemplate0 is not installed.
 mysql-workbench-community depends on libgtkmm-2.4-1c2a (>= 1:2.24.0); however:
  Package libgtkmm-2.4-1c2a is not installed.
…