In December I covered the topic The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating (which was also a response to Giuseppe Maxia's take on the same topic). Since half a year has now passed, I was wondering if I should follow up with an update. (Drizzle having a GA release would be the major news in such an update.)

But I see that Peter Zaitsev covered this topic in the opening keynote of their Percona Live conference. Since I agree with Peter's view on this topic, I just recommend you watch the talk on Percona.TV. He also uses the same categorizations of the forks, and includes "community patches" as its separate …

After the success of Percona Live in New York, we have published in our website the presentation slides of talks from the leading experts in MySQL. Check it out.

I have just upgraded the xtrabackup bazaar code repositories to the 2a format. This means that bzr 1.16 is required to access the source code repositories now.

If you get an error like the one below when working with a local branch, you’ll need to run “bzr upgrade” in it (see below for example). For branches on launchpad, you can use the web UI and hit the “upgrade branch” button.

stewart@willster:~/src/percona-xtrabackup$ bzr pull
Using saved parent location: bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/%2Bbranch/percona-xtrabackup/
Doing on-the-fly conversion from RemoteRepositoryFormat(_network_name='Bazaar repository format 2a (needs bzr 1.16 or later)\n') to RepositoryFormatKnitPack1().
This may take some time. Upgrade the repositories to the same format for better performance.
bzr: ERROR: KnitPackRepository('file:///home/stewart/src/percona-xtrabackup/.bzr/repository/')
is not compatible with …

As you may have read on the MySQL Performance Blog post – I’ve recently joined Percona. This is a fairly exciting next step. I’ll be in New York for Percona Live next week, where I’ll be giving a session titled “Drizzle 7, GA and Supported: Current & Future Features”.

I’ll write more soon, there’s a lot keeping me busy already!

Last week I wrote about my experience compiling Drizzle 7 on Mac OS X 10.6. Then David Shrewsbury informed me of his nearly identical blog post: Installing Drizzle from source on OS X. Once Drizzle 7 was running on my box, I immediately looked to see what plugins where available because Drizzle uses a lot of plugins and they are one of its notable differences from MySQL. In my humble opinion, Drizzle’s plugins will primarily influence how database professionals evaluate and decide whether or not to use Drizzle because so many of Drizzle’s features are plugins. Therefore, let’s look briefly at some the plugins included with Drizzle 7.

The plugin directory of the Drizzle 7 tarball lists 79 plugins. Each plugin …

VMware launches Cloud Foundry. Red Hat heads for Ceylon. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# VMware launched Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-service and open source project.

# Red Hat’s Gavin King revealed details of the company’s Ceylon project.

# Red Hat submitted a number of specification requests for Java EE 7.

# Terracotta accused Red Hat of “trying to pull a fast …

Two themes emerged at this week's MySQL conference: Mix your relational database with less formal solutions and move to the cloud. Naturally, the event included many other talks of a more immediate practical nature: data warehousing and business intelligence, performance (both in MySQL configuration and in the environment, which includes the changes caused by replacing disks with Flash), how to scale up, and new features in both MySQL and its children. But everyone seemed to agree that MySQL does not stand alone.

The world of databases have changed both in scale and in use. As Baron Schwartz said in his broad-vision keynote, databases are starting to need to handle petabytes. And he criticized open source database options as having poorer performance than proprietary ones. As for use, the databases struggle to meet two types of requirements: requests from business users for …

Read the detailed replication tutorial instead.


This tutorial shows how you can use the Severalnines Configurator for MySQL Replication to deploy a Multi-master replication setup, and install ClusterControl.

When the deployment is finished you have a set of tools to manage and monitor replication, as well as to add new slaves, and to perform failover.
You can choose:

• if you wish also setup bi-directional replication between the masters
• the number of …

For backups, historically in the MySQL world you’ve had mysqldump (a SQL dump, means on restore you have to rebuild indexes), InnoDB Hot Backup (proprietary, but takes a copy of the InnoDB data files, so restore is much quicker), LVM snapshots (various scripts exist, does have larger IO impact, requires LVM) and more recently xtrabackup. Xtrabackup essentially does the same thing as InnoDB hot backup except that it’s free and open source software.

Many people have been using xtrabackup successfully for quite a while now.

In Drizzle7, our default storage engine is InnoDB. There have been a few changes, but it is totally InnoDB. This leaves us with the question of backup solutions. We have drizzledump (the Drizzle equivalent to MySQL dump – although with fewer gotchas), you could always use LVM snapshots and the probability of Oracle releasing InnoDB Hot Backup for Drizzle is rather minimal.

So enter xtrabackup as a …

Backups are an integral and very important part of any system. Backups allow you to recover your data and be up and running again, in the advent of problems such as system crashes, hardware failures or users deleting data by mistake. I had been evaluating backup solution for a while but to be honest I really wasn't satisfied with the solutions available until I came across XtraBackup and I am loving it since. In this post I intend on showing how to do backups and restores using XtraBackup.