As many of you know, both MariaDB Enterprise and MaxScale have been released and are now available for use.

Since they are both so new, I just wanted to let everyone know Ivan Zoratti will conducting a webinar next week discussing both of these technologies.

I’m looking forward to it, and should anyone out there be interested in either MDBE or MaxScale, we hope you’ll attend, and get any questions you might have answered.

When: February 6, 2014 – 6:00pm CET

Sign up now here:
http://www.skysql.com/why-skysql/webinars/…maxscale-0

I know it was officially announced Monday, but I just wanted to take a moment and let everyone know MariaDB Enterprise 1.0 is now available, in case you missed the previous article.

What does MariaDB Enterprise consist of?

“MariaDB Enterprise is composed of several components including MariaDB Manager, which is a set of management tools and an API with which you can easily provision, monitor, and manage a highly available MariaDB Galera Cluster for multi-master, synchronous replication. Galera is a powerful technology that can eliminate single points of failure for your database infrastructure, but it is relatively new and can be a challenge to configure for administrators who aren’t familiar with it.”

https://mariadb.com/..MariaDB Enterprise – Getting Started …

Another obscure issue I ran into not long ago was when using MySQL Workbench, and clicking on a table, it became stuck in fetching mode.

What triggered the issue was a recent MySQL upgrade, but MySQL itself, not Workbench.

After checking the error log, we saw an error like:

Incorrect definition of table mysql.proc: expected column
'comment' at position 15 to have type text, found type char(64)

Instantly, I knew mysql_upgrade needed to be ran in order to fix the “Incorrect definition” issue, and turns out that is the root cause for Workbench getting stuck in the “fetching” mode.

So the solution is to run mysql_upgrade. Should that not fix the table for some reason, then you can also fix it alternatively with:

ALTER TABLE mysql.proc MODIFY `comment` text
CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL;
FLUSH TABLES;

Hope this helps.

I ran into a rather obscure bug the other day, but while uncommon, it can cause damage you would not otherwise expect if you use file-level symbolic links. So this is just a warning about that.

Specifically, if you create a table with the .MYI and .MYD files in a different directory, using symbolic links – either manually or using CREATE TABLE .. INDEX DIRECTORY=”" DATA DIRECTORY=”", and then run myisamchk on the table and specify .MYI, you will corrupt the table.

Creating these manually is not so common, but the CREATE TABLE .. INDEX DIRECTORY=”" DATA DIRECTORY=”" is much more common, which creates file-level symbolic links (for the .MYI and .MYD files, respectively) in the datadir and stores the actual file(s) in the location specified. So it leaves you with this setup.

Therefore, if you later run myisamchk on one of these files, do not specify .MYI in the command invocation. If you invoke myisamchk –help, …

MaxScale is the new proxy server from the SkySQL/MariaDB team. It provides Connection Load Balancing (CLB) and Statement Load Balancing (SLB) out of the box. This post is a [relatively] quick “how to” install, configure and test SLB with the read/write splitting module.

Step 1 - Server preparationIf you do not have many HW resources, you may run everything on a single Linux instance, but the best way to test MaxScale is to use at least 4 servers: one for MaxScale and for the client apps, one as Master and two as slaves - so, 4 in total. In this post I am going a bit further, I will use 5 servers:
Max 0 - For client apps (192.168.56.20)
Max 1 - The master server (192.168.56.21)
Max 2 - The first slave (192.168.56.22)
Max 3 - The second slave (192.168.56.23)
Max 4 - The third slave (192.168.56.24)
Max 6 - The MaxScale server (192.168.56.26)

In order to do proper tests …

In many parts of the MySQL world, whether you have users, developers or administrators of MySQL, the season holidays are for family, relax, prayers, travel, or they are simply a moment where you can enjoy what you like or care most about.

For me, this time is dedicated to my family, but also to deeper thoughts around the strategies to adopt in short and long term. My work nowadays, as the work of many others, is ruled by quick decisions, by the "time to market” - whatever “market" means in a specific context. Decisions must be made in meetings that are time-boxed in one hour or even less. In the end, you accumulate so much work and high priority tasks that you do not have enough time to prepare the topics adequately.

I thought I could summarise my thoughts for the past year and for the near future, from a technical and from a business perspective.

A transient 2013To me, 2013 was a transient …

For my 25 readers (Italians would know better, citing The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni): if you are a techie and you do not know me , you can stop reading. No tech tips inside, nor 5 gazillion queries per second improvement in this post, sorry!

On the other hand, if curiosity is what drives you through the posts of PlanetMySQL  you may find bits in this post of some interest, or even helpful.

Few days ago I opened my blog and found the last post, dated April 2013. It was a reminder for the readers that the OpenStack Summit …

Saw this on @awsmarketplace the other day:

#opensource #MariaDB by @SkySQL on @AWSMarketplace http://t.co/o3KQ9xe9sr #mysql

— AWS Marketplace (@awsmarketplace) October 8, 2013

Now on the AWS Marketplace, you can …

About a month ago, I accepted an offer to work at SkySQL as the Chief Evangelist for MariaDB. So the change in affiliation announced in April 2013 has come to fruition. What this realistically means is that my email address changes to colin@mariadb.com, though I am still reachable at colin@mariadb.org even though I’m not part of the MariaDB Foundation.

There are a lot of structural changes that urgently need work and I expect to be spending quite some time on all this. In the meantime, read an update from the SkySQL CEO Patrik Sallner.

…

Looking at the committers/authors of patches in the bzr tree for MariaDB 5.5.31.

Non Oracle Contributors:

1. Alexander Barkov
2. Alexey Botchkov
3. Elena Stepanova
4. Igor Babaev
5. knielsen
6. Michael Widenius
7. sanja
8. Sergei Golubchik
9. Sergey Petrunya
10. timour
11. Vladislav Vaintroub

Oracle (as they pull Oracle changes):

1. Aditya A
2. Akhila Maddukuri
3. Alexander Nozdrin
4. Anirudh Mangipudi
5. Annamalai Gurusami
6. Astha Pareek
7. Balasubramanian Kandasamy
8. Chaithra Gopalareddy
9. Daniel Fischer
10. Gleb Shchepa
11. Harin Vadodaria
12. Hery Ramilison
13. Igor Solodovnikov
14. Inaam Rana
15. Jon Olav Hauglid
16. kevin.lewis
17. Krunal …