I had an enjoyable time last night at Twitter with local MySQL DBAs and developers. We had an attendee who has no experience with SQL or programming at all. She is interested in organizing her collection of recipes and had heard a rumor that MySQL was a good tool to use for this task. She indicated that her desktop runs Windows 7. I think I’m going to encourage her to turn her concept in to a community project, as she is not the first person I’ve met who wants to organize recipes!

We were hosted by Rob at Twitter, who used to work with Lisa back before she retired. He’s a member of the site reliability team and keeps the fail whale from rearing its blubbery head.

Pizza was provided by my dear friend and long-time open source buddy Gerry Narvaja with the assistance of the folks in the kitchen at Zeek’s.

We discussed new techniques in the areas of load …

Madrid MySQL Users Group will have its next meeting on Tuesday, the 18th of December. Details can be found on the group’s Meetup page here: http://www.meetup.com/Madrid-MySQL-users-group/events/219081693/.  This will be meeting number 10 of MMUG and the last meeting of the year. We plan to talk about MySQL, MariaDB and related things. An excuse to talk about our … Continue reading MMUG10: Madrid MySQL Users Group meeting to take place on 18th December 2014

MariaDB tries to encourage use of many storage engines, which Oracle doesn't bother with. The ones that could be considered -- occasionally! -- as InnoDB replacements are: Mroonga, TokuDB, and Aria.

Mroonga

I predicted that Mroonga would be in MariaDB 10.0.8, and behold, here it is in MariaDB 10.0.15. Truly I am the Nostradamus of the database world.

It's a general-purpose storage engine, in that it doesn't have serious limitations regarding what can be stored or indexed. I think its "column-store" feature has limited appeal, but as I saw in January, it's dandy for full-text searching. This time I look at the list of "Full-Text Restrictions" in the MySQL manual, and quote from it:

"Full-text searches are supported for …

December 8, 2014 By Severalnines

Percona XtraBackup is a great backup tool with lots of nice features to make online and consistent backups, although the variety of options can be a bit overwhelming. s9s_backup tries to make it simpler for users, it creates an easy to use interface for XtraBackup features such as full backups, incremental backups, streaming/non-streaming, and parallel compression.

Backups are organized into backup sets, consisting of a full backup and zero or more incremental backups. s9s_backup manages the LSNs (Log Sequence Number) of the XtraBackups. The backup set can then be restored as one single unit using just one command.

In earlier posts, we covered various ways on restoring your backup files …

December 1, 2014 By Severalnines

MariaDB 10 supports multi-source replication, and each MariaDB Galera node can have up to 64 masters connected to it. So it is possible to use a MariaDB Cluster as an aggregator for many single-instance MariaDB master servers.

In this blog post, we are going to show you how to setup multi-source replication with MariaDB Galera Cluster, where one of the Galera nodes is acting as slave to 3 MariaDB masters (see diagram below). If you would like to set this up with Percona XtraDB Cluster or Galera Cluster (Codership), please read this post instead.

MariaDB GTID vs MySQL GTID

MariaDB has a different implementation of Global Transaction ID (GTID), and is enabled by default starting from MariaDB 10.0.2. Multi-source replication in MariaDB works …

I spent the last 4 years at SkySQL/MariaDB working on versions of MySQL that could be “suitable for the cloud”. I strongly believed that the world needed a version of MySQL that could work in the cloud even better than its comparable version on bare metal. Users and administrators wanted to benefit from the use of cloud infrastructures and at the same time they wanted to achieve the same performance and overall stability of their installations on bare metal. Unfortunately, ACID-compliant databases in the cloud suffer from the issues that any centrally controlled and strictly persistent system can get when hosted on highly distributed and natively stateless infrastructures.
In this post I am not going to talk about the improvements needed for MySQL in the cloud - I will tackle this topic in a future post. Today I'd like to focus on the business side of RDS and Aurora. 
In the last 4 years I had endless discussions over …

November 20, 2014 By Severalnines

Multi-source replication means that one server can have multiple masters from which it replicates. Why multi-source? One good reason is to consolidate databases (e.g. merge your shards) for analytical reporting or as a centralized backup server. MariaDB 10 already has this feature, and MySQL 5.7 will also support it. 

It is possible to set up your Galera Cluster as an aggregator of your masters in a multi-source replication setup, we’ll walk you through the steps in this blog. Note that the howto is for Galera Cluster for MySQL (Codership) and Percona XtraDB Cluster. In a separate post, we’ll show you how to configure MariaDB Cluster 10 instead. If you would like to use MySQL Cluster (NDB) as aggregator, then check out this blog.

Galera …

The MySQL/MariaDB optimiser likes to know things like the cardinality of an index – that is, the number of distinct values the index holds. For a PRIMARY KEY, which only has unique values, the number is the same as the number of rows.  For an indexed column that is boolean (such as yes/no) the cardinality would be 2.

There’s more to it than that, but the point is that the optimiser needs some statistics from indexes in order to try and make somewhat sane decisions about which index to use for a particular query. The statistics also need to be updated when a significant number of rows have been added, deleted, or modified.

In MyISAM, ANALYZE TABLE does a tablescan where everything is tallied, and the index stats are updated. InnoDB, on the other hand, has always done “index dives”, looking at a small sample and deriving from that. That can be ok as a methodology, but unfortunately the history is awkward. The …

November 19, 2014 By Severalnines

Following the release of ClusterControl 1.2.8 with a range of cool new features, we have now also published a new ClusterControl User Guide that provides all the steps, tips & tricks to follow in order to successfully deploy, monitor, manage and scale database clusters.  

This user guide predominantly covers ClusterControl with MySQL-based clusters, namely:

• Percona XtraDB Cluster
• MariaDB Cluster
• Galera Cluster for MySQL (Codership)
• MySQL Cluster
• MySQL Replication
• A pool of MySQL single instances

New features in ClusterControl 1.2.8 include: 

• Deployment and scaling of …

Multi-threaded replication is a new feature introduced in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 10.0. In traditional single-threaded replication, the slaves have a disadvantage as they have to process in sequence what a master executed in parallel. This, plus the fact that slaves usually have a lot of read-only connections to deal with as well, can easily create performance problems. That is, a single-threaded slave needs to be set to allow fewer connections, otherwise there’s a higher risk of it not being able to keep up with the replication stream. There is no exact rule for this, as it relates to general I/O capacity and fsync latency, as well as general CPU and RAM considerations and query …