We had really great webinar on Replicating to/from Oracle earliest this month, and you can view the recording of that Webinar here.

A good sign of how great a Webinar was is the questions that come afterwards, and we didn’t get through them all. so here are all the questions and answers for the entire webinar.

Q: What is the overhead of Replicator on source database with asynchronous CDC?

A: With asynchronous operation there is no substantial CPU overhead (as with synchronous), but the amount of generated redo logs becomes bigger requiring more disk space and better log management to ensure that the space is used effectively.

Q: Do you support migration from Solaris/Oracle to Linux/Oracle?

A: The replication is not certified for use on Solaris, however, it is possible to …

I was suitably heartened to hear about the new mine opening up in the Devon here in the UK to mine the element Tungsten.

I comment on this to my associates at Continuent, where comments were made by Csaba as to the appropriate quotes in the article:

“Tungsten is an extraordinary metal.”

“It’s almost as hard as a diamond and has one of the highest melting points of any mineral.”

“Adding a small amount to steel makes it far harder, far more resistant to stress and heat. The benefits to industry are obvious.”

Leading to him to suggest Adding a small amount of Tungsten to MySQL makes it far harder, far more resistant to stress and failures. The benefits to industry are obvious.

I couldn’t possibly agree more!

Filed under: …

I’m pleased to say that Continuent will be at the Hadoop Summit in San Jose next week (3-5 June). Sadly I will not be attending as I’m taking an exam next week, but my colleagues Robert Hodges, Eero Teerikorpi and Petri Versunen will be there to answer any questions you have about Continuent products, and, of course, Hadoop replication support built into Tungsten Replicator 3.0.

If you are at the conference, please go along and say hi to the team. And, as always, if there are any questions please let them or me know.

Filed under: Presentations and Conferences Tagged: big data, continuent, …

So I’ve submitted my talks for the Tech14 UK Oracle User Group conference which is in Liverpool this year. I’m not going to give away the topics, but you can imagine they are going to be about data translation and movement and how to get your various databases talking together.

I can also say, after having seen other submissions for talks this year (as I’m helping to judge), that the conference is shaping up to be very interesting. There’s a good spread of different topics this year, but I know from having talked to the organisers that they are looking for more submissions in the areas of Operating Systems, Engineered Systems and Development (mobile and cloud).

If you’ve got a paper, presentation, or idea for one that you think would be useful, …

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 …

One of the key platforms I’ve been testing on for the MySQL to Hadoop replication has been Cloudera, largely driven by customer requirements, but it’s also one of the easiest way to get started with Hadoop.

What I’m even more pleased about is the fact that we are proud to announce that Tungsten Replicator 3.0 is certified for use on the new Cloudera Enterprise 5 platform. That means that we’re sure that replicating your data from MySQL to Cloudera 5 and have it work without causing problems or difficulties on the Hadoop loading and materialisation.

Cloudera is a great product, and we’re very happy to be working so effectively with the new Cloudera Enterprise 5. Cloudera …

Hopefully by now you have already seen that we are working on Hadoop replication. I’m happy to say that it is going really well. I’ve managed to push a few terabytes of data and different data sets through into Hadoop on Cloudera, HortonWorks, and Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce (EMR). For those who have been following my long association with the IBM InfoSphere BigInsights Hadoop product, and I’m pleased to say that it’s working there too. I’ve had to adapt Robert’s original script to work with the different versions of the underlying Hadoop tools and systems to make it compatible. The actual performance and process is unchanged; you just use a different JS-based batchloader script to work with different tools.

Robert has also been simplifying some of the core functionality, such as configuring some fixed pre-determined formats, so you no longer have to explicitly set the field and record separators.

I’ve also been …

To follow-up and describe some of the methods and techniques behind replicating into Hadoop from MySQL in real-time, and how this can be combined into your data workflow, Continuent are running a webinar with me presenting that will go over the details and provide a demo of the data replication process.

Real-Time Data Loading from MySQL to Hadoop with New Tungsten Replicator 3.0

Hadoop is an increasingly popular means of analyzing transaction data from MySQL. Up until now mechanisms for moving data between MySQL and Hadoop have been rather limited. The new Continuent Tungsten Replicator 3.0 provides enterprise-quality replication from MySQL to Hadoop. Tungsten Replicator 3.0 is 100% open source, released under a GPL V2 license, and available for download at https://code.google.com/p/tungsten-replicator/. Continuent Tungsten handles MySQL transaction …

Coming up as a new feature in Tungsten Replicator (and written by our replicator expert Stephane Giron) is the ability to provision a new database by using data from an existing database. This new feature comes in the form of a tool called the Parallel Extractor.

The principles are very simple. On the master side:

• Start the master replicator offline.
• Switch the replicator to the online provision state.
• The master replicator pulls the data out of the existing database and writes that information into the Transaction History Log (THL). At this point, the normal replicator thread is not extracting events from the source database.
• Once the parallel replication has completed, the replicator switches over to normal extraction mode, and starts writing change data into the THL.

On the slave side, the THL events are read as usual from the master and applied to the slave, but …

Now I’m back in the MySQL fold, I’ve got the opportunity to speak at Percona Live again. I’ve always enjoyed speaking at this conference (back when it was known by another name…), although I need to up my game and do the 6 talks I did back in 2009.

On the Tuesday afternoon, tutorials day, I’m running a half-day session with my replication colleague Linas Virbalas. This will be similar to the session I did at Percona Live London, and cover some of the more advanced content on replication, including, but not limited to:

• Filters
• JavaScript Filtering
• Some fun and practical filters
• Heterogeneous replication from MySQL out to MongoDB, Vertica, Oracle and Hadoop

I might even choose to demo …