The biggest innovation in TokuDB v7.5 is Read Free Replication (RFR). I blogged a few days ago posting a benchmark showing how much additional throughput can be achieved on a replication slave, while at the same time lowering the read IO operations to almost zero. The official documentation on the feature is available here.

In this second blog I want to cover the requirements for RFR, as well as some interesting use-cases for the technology.

September 25, 2014 By Severalnines

Coming up with a backup strategy that does not affect database performance or lock your tables can be tricky. How do you backup your production database cluster without affecting your applications? Should you use mysqldump or Percona Xtrabackup? When should you use incremental backups? Where do you store the backups? In this blog post, we will cover some of the common backup methods for Galera Cluster for MySQL/MariaDB, and how you can get the most out of these. 

Backup Method

There are various ways to backup your Galera Cluster data:

• xtrabackup (full physical backup)
• xtrabackup (incremental physical backup)
• mysqldump (logical backup)
• binary logging 
• replication slave

Xtrabackup (full backup)

Xtrabackup is an open-source MySQL hot …

New to TokuDB® v7.5 is a feature we’re calling “Read Free Replication” (RFR). RFR allows TokuDB replication slaves to process insert, update, and delete statements with almost no read IO. As a result, the slave can easily keep up with the master (no lag) as well as brings all the read IO capacity of the slave for read-scaling your workload.

The goal of this blog is two-fold: (1) to cover why RFR is important and how RFR works and (2) to run a simple before/after benchmark showing the impact of RFR on a well known workload. Later this week I’ll post another blog showing other interesting use-cases for RFR beyond this first benchmark.

Read Free Replication: The Why and How

In MySQL, a replication slave does less work than the master because there is no need for a slave to execute SELECT statements (only INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE). However, a MYSQL slave can struggle to keep up with the master because replication is …

September 22, 2014 By Severalnines

Need to add phone and SMS alerting to ClusterControl? ClusterControl 1.2.8 introduces support for PagerDuty, an alerting service for Ops teams to schedule on-calls and add phone and SMS notifications to IT tools. By integrating PagerDuty with ClusterControl, you can start receiving phone, SMS and email notifications for all important database events as monitored by ClusterControl. Alerts go directly to the right person who can solve the issue.

This integration is possible thanks to a new plugin interface, that takes ClusterControl alarms in JSON format and outputs to an external system via plugins. Plugins can be either scripts or executable binaries.

We have built a few example …

Today we released TokuDB® v7.5, the latest version of Tokutek’s storage engine for MySQL and MariaDB.

I’ll be publishing two blogs next week to go into more details about our new “Read Free Replication”, but here are high level descriptions of the most important new features.

Read Free Replication

TokuDB replication slaves can now be configured to process the binary logs with virtually no read IO. This is accomplished via two new server parameters: one to allow the skipping of uniqueness checks (for inserts and updates), the other to eliminate read-before-write behavior (for updates and deletes). The two other conditions are that the slave must be in read-only mode and replication must be row based.

Hot Backup Now Supports Multiple Directories (Enterprise Edition)

The original implementation of our Hot Backup functionality was only capable of …

September 18, 2014 By Severalnines

Galera Cluster is a popular choice for achieving high availability using synchronous replication. Though if you are planning to run huge sites with many DB objects (tables), a few tweaks are necessary. 

Yes, you might have been successful in loading your 1000s of databases and 1000s of tables, but what happens if you have a node failure and Galera recovery fails?

In this blog post we will show you how to determine one common error related to the open_files_limit that MySQL imposes, and also to spot another potential pitfall.

Open_files_limit

If you are using wsrep_sst_method=xtrabackup or wsrep_sst_method=xtrabackup-v2 then you will find a log file in the data directory of the donor node. This log file is called innobackup.backup.log.

140912 19:10:15  innobackupex: Done. …

September 17, 2014 By Severalnines

The Severalnines team is pleased to announce the release of ClusterControl 1.2.8. This release contains key new features along with performance improvements and bug fixes. We have outlined some of the key new features below. 

Highlights of ClusterControl 1.2.8 include:

• YUM/APT repositories for ClusterControl
• Deployment and scaling of single-node MySQL, MariaDB and MongoDB
• Alerts and incident tracking with PagerDuty 
• Unified Event Viewer
• New flexible alarms/email notification system
• Audit logging - Administrator activity tracking
• Global MySQL User Management
• New default dashboards for MySQL/MariaDB
• Puppet Module …

With the upcoming release of MySQL 5.7 I begin to see a problem which I think needs attention at least for 5.8 or whatever comes next. The GA release cycle is too long, being about 2 years and that means 3 years between upgrades in a production environment More people use MySQL and the data … Continue reading Making MySQL Better More Quickly

September 11, 2014 By Severalnines

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in this week’s webinar on ‘Performance Tuning of HAProxy for Database Load Balancing’. And special thanks to our guest speaker, Baptiste Assmann of HAProxy Technologies. 

If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

Watch the replay of this webinar to learn about what HAProxy can tell you about your application and database instances. And understand the difference between short-lived connections and persistent connections, and how they affect the performance and availability of your applications. 

Watch the replay Performance …

September 10, 2014 By Severalnines

If you are automating your infrastructure using Puppet, then this blog is for you. We are glad to announce the availability of a Puppet module for ClusterControl. For those using Chef, we already published Chef cookbooks for Galera Cluster and ClusterControl some time back.  

ClusterControl on Puppet Forge

The ClusterControl module initial release is available on Puppet Forge, installing the module is as easy as:

$ puppet module install severalnines-clustercontrol

If you haven’t change the default module path, this module will be installed under /etc/puppet/modules/clustercontrol on …