October 31, 2014 By Severalnines

When running a MariaDB Cluster or Percona XtraDB Cluster, it is common to use a load balancer to distribute client requests across multiple database nodes. Load balancing SQL requests aims to optimize the usage of the database nodes, maximize throughput, minimize response times and avoid overload of the Galera nodes. 

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at four different open source load balancers, and do a quick benchmark to compare performance:

• HAproxy by HAproxy Technologies
• IPVS by Linux Virtual Server Project
• Galera Load Balancer by Codership
• mysqlproxy by Oracle (alpha)

Note that there are other options out there, e.g. MaxScale from the MariaDB team, that we plan to cover in a future post.

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Sometimes users ask for something that doesn’t really make sense. On the first glance. But then you start asking and realize that the user was right, you were wrong, and it is, actually, a perfectly logical and valid use case.

I’ve had one of these moments when I’ve heard about a request of making triggers to work on the slave in the row-based replication. Like, really? In RBR all changes made by triggers are replicated from the master to slaves as row events. If triggers would be fired on the slave they would do their changes twice. And anyway, assuming that one only has triggers one the slave (why?) in statement-based replication triggers would run on the slave normally, wouldn’t they?

Well, yes, they would, but one cannot always use statement-based replication. If one could, RBR would’ve never been implemented. There are many cases that statement-based replication cannot handle correctly. Galera requires RBR too. And as …

As of today, Continuent is part of VMware. We are absolutely over the moon about it.

You can read more about the news on the VMware vCloud blog by Ajay Patel, our new boss. There’s also an official post on our Continuent company blog. In a nutshell the Continuent team is joining the VMware Cloud Services Division. We will continue to improve, sell, and support our Tungsten products and work on innovative integration into VMware’s product line.

So why do I feel exhilarated about joining VMware? There are three reasons. 

1.     Continuent is joining a world-class company that is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. Even …

Percona Live UK is upon us and I have the privilege to present a tutorial on setting up multi-source replication in MariaDB 10.0 on Nov 3, 2014.

If you’re joining me at PLUK14, we will go over setting up two different topologies that incorporates the features in MariaDB. The first is a mirrored topology:

Replication Topologies – Mirrored

This basically makes use of an existing DR environment by setting it up to be able to write to either master. Please be advised, this is normally not recommended due to the complexity of making your application able to resolve conflicts and …

October 27, 2014 By Severalnines

The term data warehousing often brings to mind things like large complex projects, big businesses, proprietary hardware and expensive software licenses. With Hadoop came open source data analysis software that ran on commodity hardware, this helped address at least some of the cost aspects. We had previously blogged about MongoDB and MySQL to Hadoop. But setting up and maintaining a Hadoop infrastructure might still be out of reach for small businesses or small projects with limited budgets. Well, perhaps then you might want to have a look at Redshift.

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Let me start with a little story. You sit in your house near the fireplace in the living room and need a book from the library… Eh, no, sorry, wrong century. You’re building a robotic arm that will open your beer or brew your coffee or supply you with whatever other drinks of your choice… while you’ll be building the next robotic arm. So, you — soldering iron in one hand and Arduino in another — ask your little brother to bring a box with specific resistors (that you unexpectedly run out of) from the cellar. The problem — your brother is small and cannot tell a resistor from a respirator. You explain that it’s small thing with two wires sticking out of it. And he starts going back and forth brining you boxes after boxes of different small things with two wires.

This is approximately where we were in MySQL when NDB Cluster was just added. The use wants to find a row, say WHERE number_of_wires=2 AND size='small' AND …

I don’t think it’ll surprise anybody if I say that MariaDB or MySQL server knows a lot more about server system variables, then just their values. Indeed, every variable can be session or global only, read-only or writable, it has an associated help text (that is printed on mysqld --help --verbose), certain variables only accept values from a given set of strings (this set of allowed values is also printed in mysqld --help --verbose since MariaDB 10.1.0), numeric variables have lower and upper range boundaries of valid values (that are never printed anywhere), and so on. I always thought it’s kind of a waste that there is no way to query this information. That could’ve been very convenient, in particular for various GUI clients — they could show the help in tooltips, validate values and so on.

But recently we’ve got our users asking for it — precisely, for system variable metadata, whether a variable …

MariaDB 10.1.1 was recently released, and is available for download here:

https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/10.1.1/

This is the second alpha release of MariaDB 10.1, so there are a lot of new changes and functionalities added, and many, many bugs fixed (I counted 637). Since it’s alpha, I’ll only cover the major changes and additions, as there are a lot of great new features, and omit covering any of the bug fixes (feel free to browse them all here).

To me, these are the highlights of the new features:

• InnoDB: You can now use OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment InnoDB tablespaces (merged the Facebook/Kakao defragmentation patch). (Good blog post …

One of the most popular plugin types both in MariaDB and MySQL is INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugin type. INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugins add new tables to the INFORMATION_SCHEMA. There are lots of INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugins, because they can be used to show just anything to the user and are very easy to write.

MariaDB 10.1.1 comes with nine INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugin:

• Feedback — shows the anonymised server usage information and can optionally send it to the configured url.
• Locales — lists compiled-in server locales, implemented by Roberto Spadim
• METADATA_LOCK_INFO — Lists metadata locks in the server. Implemented by Kentoku Shiba
• …

Every now and then there is a need to execute certain SQL statements conditionally. Easy, if you do it from your PHP (or Java or whatever) application. But if all you have is pure SQL? There are two techniques that MariaDB and MySQL use in the mysql_fix_privilege_tables.sql script (applied by mysql_upgrade tool).

1. Create a stored procedure with IF statements inside, call it once and drop it. This requires the user to have the CREATE ROUTINE privilege and mysql.proc table must exist and be usable (which is not necessarily true — we’re doing it from mysql_upgrade, right?).
2. Use dynamic SQL, like
   

   SET @str = IF (@have_csv = 'YES',
                  'CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS general_log (
                     event_time TIMESTAMP(6) NOT NULL,
                     user_host MEDIUMTEXT NOT NULL,
                     thread_id BIGINT(21) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, …