Continuent Tungsten is one of the few all-in-one solutions for MySQL high availability. In this post I will show you how to automate the upgrade process using Ansible. I will walk you through the individual tasks and, finally, give you the complete playbook.

We will use a rolling approach, upgrading the slaves first, and finally upgrading the former master. There is no need for a master switch, as the process is transparent to the application.

I am assuming you are using the .ini based installation method. If you are still using staging host, I suggest you update your set up.

Pre tasks

The first step is ensuring the cluster is healthy, because we don’t want to start taking nodes offline unless we are sure the cluster is in good shape. One way of doing that is by using the built-in script tungsten_monitor. When we run the playbook, we only need to validate the cluster status on one node, so I am adding …

Recently we had a customer who came to us for help with monitoring their InnoDB cluster setup. They run a 5.7 InnoDB cluster and suffered from a network outage that split up their cluster leaving it with no writeable primaries. As part of their incident followup, they asked us for methods to monitor this cluster.

I had tested before with InnoDB clusters (in both 8.0 and 5.7 variants) and I was confident that we could parse the cluster node “role” (read-write aka primary vs. read-only aka secondary) from the performance_schema tables. As it turned out, this feature is not in 5.7 but only 8.0. However, the docs on this are wrong for 5.7 as these docs suggest that the performance_schema.group_replication_members table would show PRIMARY and SECONDARY role of each cluster node. I have submitted a …

In just over two weeks, on Feb 2-3, FOSDEM 2019 will take place. As happens every year, the first weekend of February The University Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) opens the doors of campus Solbosch to the worldwide open source community. What started as a small gathering of open source hackers has now become one of the world’s largest open source community events with speakers from all over the globe. All major open source software vendors want to be there and you will find boots for every possible Linux distribution.

For the third year in a row now, Oracle is organizing a pre-FOSDEM MySQL day. As the name suggests, this event takes place the day before FOSDEM (Friday, Feb 1st). This day is loaded with content on MySQL 8.0. …

This log buffer edition overs cloud, Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Cloud

On December 4, 2018 Microsoft’s Azure Database for Open Sources announced the general availability of MariaDB. This blog intends to share some guidance and best practices for alerting on the most commonly monitored metrics for the service.

Technology allows manufacturers to generate more data than traditional systems and users can digest. Predictive analytics, enabled by big data and cloud technologies, can take advantage of this data and provide new and unique insights into the health of manufacturing equipment and processes.

…

We recently helped a social media management platform improve its security and performance.

The social media platform supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, and has more than 15 million users. The company needed to ensure maximum security and performance for its authentication processes by reducing the hours and errors associated with manual administration.

These improvements would allow the organization to not only minimize downtime and expand the feature set available to its developers, but would also ensure the company’s compliance with Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The challenge was automating its database user management and authentication processes, which required knowledge of MySQL security and DevOps environments.

Pythian’s experts have deep knowledge of MySQL security and DevOps-structured environments, and were able to develop …

Co-Author: Rafael Alvarez

When you look up the word idempotence in wikipedia you get the following definition: Idempotence is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.

When I think of idempotence in the sense of how IT operations work, the very first thing that comes to mind is Ansible. In Ansible you have a yml file that represents a state you want the target host to be in. For example, I can use the yum module to ensure that MySQL is installed on my RHEL virtual machine. When the playbook is run, it checks if MySQL is installed. If not, it will install it. It is installed, then it will ignore that …

This log buffer edition covers Cloud, Oracle and MySQL.

Cloud

Cloud Directory is a neglected serverless data store that deserves much more attention.

Many of our large enterprise customers have this worry hanging over their heads … what are they going to do about that mainframe when they migrate?

Miners Extract More Value from the Cloud When They Transform Their Cultures

7 steps to keep your …

Recently our team was tasked to implement MySQL 8.0 in production for a client. While MySQL 8.0 is looking very promising and has a lot of cool new features and revamped old features, it’s still pretty young. The MySQL development team is working very hard on stabilizing the product but, reading the latest release notes for version 8.0.12, it is still very much a bugfix release and not something you will want to put in production immediately. Also, given the fact that a lot of tools such as Percona Xtrabackup do not support MySQL 8.0 yet, we were a bit reluctant to proceed with this idea. But … the client had a strong use case to make use of roles and resource groups and we like challenges so we decided to give it a go.

Another use case that was presented is the one where …

Everyone knows those situations where there is a task that you need to do and you want to do, but you just don’t come around to actually doing it. Well, for me, this new release was such a task.

Early in 2017, I released the first version of puppet-proxysql on GitHub. It was my first puppet-module release and I was quite proud of it. I had implemented types and providers for managing the ProxySQL resources such as mysql_user, mysql_servers, etc…

At Config Management Camp Gent (February 2017) I met Vox Pupuli, who is the group that forms the puppet-user-community. They picked up the responsibility of taking ownership of well-known modules that are left unmaintained or abandoned and/or modules that only had a single maintainer. The puppet-proxysql module was kind of the latter. Additionally, they …

This is the same plugin that Alex Gorvachev created back in the day. I’ve simply modified it to be compatible with both 12c and 13c versions.

I created this in response to a comment on the blog about issues deploying the plugin in OEM 13c. There is also a note in MOS “EM 13c: Adding a MySQL Instance in Enterprise Manager 13c Fails with Error: oracle.sysman.emSDK.agent.client.exception.NoSuchMetricException: the Load metric does not exist (Doc ID 2160785.1)“.

This version has been tested with OEM 13cR2 and OEM 12cR3, so it should be working in all the versions in between except for bugs.

Caveats

During the …