We’ve all been through downtime at some point and deplore the lost work and productivity that comes with it. And the only thing worse than server downtime is having to report that downtime to frustrated customers who are depending on your service for their business.

Yesterday, AWS server issues meant downtime for highly trafficked sites Instagram, Vine, Airbnb, and IFTTTA. According to AWS’s health dashboard, the company’s North Virginia data center may be to blame.

The fact is, any cloud system is subject to outages, from Yahoo Mail to Microsoft BPOS and VMware; however, outages aren’t and shouldn’t be business as normal.

While we never wish for anyone to experience downtime, when stories like AWS hit the …

With the General Availability of the standalone MySQL Utilities it now makes sense to use these to simplify (and optionally automate) your MySQL Replication and High Availability solutions. In light of that, 4 of our MySQL white papers have been updated to reflect the new opportunities:

MySQL Guide to High Availability Solutions. Data is the currency of today’s web, mobile, social, enterprise and cloud applications. Ensuring data is always available is a top priority for any organization – minutes of downtime will result in significant loss of …

With the release of MySQL Utilities 1.3.4, the standalone (not bundled with the MySQL WorkBench GUI) package is now Generally Available and fully supported. This post will focus on a very important change (the ability to run as a daemon rather than in a terminal) to the mysqlfailover utility which allows you to build a light-weight HA database solution using MySQL Replication.

For a general overview of MySQL Utilities, take a look at this recent webinar or for a deeper dive into using them to setup replication and adding auto-failover of the master function to slaves watch this video and worked example. …

Among many of the improvements you can enjoy in MySQL 5.6, there is one that addresses a huge operational problem that most DBAs and System Administrators encounter in their life: schema changes.

While it is usually not a problem for small tables or those in early stages of product life cycle, schema changes become a huge pain once your tables get a significant amount of data. Planning for maintenance is becoming more and more difficult, and your worldwide users want the service to be up and running 24/7, while on the other hand, your developers desire to introduce schema changes every week.

Read my full article on MySQL Performance Blog

Among many of the improvements you can enjoy in MySQL 5.6, there is one that addresses a huge operational problem that most DBAs and System Administrators encounter in their life: schema changes.

While it is usually not a problem for small tables or those in early stages of product life cycle, schema changes become a huge pain once your tables get a significant amount of data. Planning for maintenance is becoming more and more difficult, and your worldwide users want the service to be up and running 24/7, while on the other hand, your developers desire to introduce schema changes every week.

PITA

But what is the real problem here? Let me illustrate very typical case:

Session1> ALTER TABLE revision ADD COLUMN mycol tinyint;
Query OK, 1611193 rows affected (1 min 5.74 sec)
Records: 1611193  Duplicates: 0 …

July 2, 2013 By Severalnines

Joomla! is estimated to be the second most used CMS on the internet after WordPress, with users like eBay, IKEA, Sony, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. In this post, we will describe how to scale Joomla on multiple servers. This architecture not only allows the CMS to handle more users, by load-balancing traffic across multiple servers. It also brings high availability by providing fail-over between servers.

This post is similar to our previous posts on web application scalability and high availability:

• Drupal - Apache, MySQL Galera Cluster, csync2 with lsyncd
• Wordpress - Apache, Percona XtraDB Cluster, …

June 28, 2013 By Severalnines

This article describes how to setup replication between a regular MySQL server and a Galera Cluster. The regular MySQL Server is the MASTER , and one of the Galera nodes will be the SLAVE:

In this example we have the following hosts:

• REGULAR MASTER: 10.0.1.10
• GALERA NODE #1 (SLAVE): 10.0.1.11

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June 17, 2013 By Severalnines

Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform built on Zend PHP and MySQL. It is widely adopted by online retailers with some 150,000 sites known to use it. Single server setups are easy to set up, but if your store is a huge success, then you probably need to think about clustering your environment with multiple servers. Clustering is done at the web, database and file-system level, as all web nodes need access to catalog images. 

This post is similar to our previous posts on scaling Drupal and WordPress performance, and focuses on how to scale Magento on multiple servers. The software used is Magento version 1.7.0.2 , nginx, HAProxy, MySQL Galera …

Join us at the next MySQL & Cloud Database Solutions Day hosted by SkySQL & MariaDB in Berlin on June 18th

It’s a beautiful day in Berlin today and we’re putting the final touches to next week’s MySQL & Cloud Database Solutions Day, which takes place on Tuesday June 18th in the facilities provided by Bitkom in Berlin Mitte.

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Join us at the next MySQL & Cloud Database Solutions Day hosted by SkySQL & MariaDB in Berlin on June 18th

It’s a beautiful day in Berlin today and we’re putting the final touches to next week’s MySQL & Cloud Database Solutions Day, which takes place on Tuesday June 18th in the facilities provided by Bitkom in Berlin Mitte.

read more