It's been almost a year now since the initial release of MySQL Fabric. It is maturing and reached a GA state earlier this year as part of MySQL Utilities 1.4. Developers and architects are evaluating it for their applications, learning the capabilities of the system, and providing feedback for future features and usability enhancements. Connector/J has supported Fabric from the very beginning and continues to support the latest features. This blog post is an introductory level guide to using Fabric for high-availability from Java applications. Sharding features and Java APIs will be covered in a later post. The commands shown and feature descriptions are current for Fabric 1.5.1. In addition, Connector/J 5.1.32 and later support only Fabric 1.5 due to communication protocol differences from Fabric 1.4.

High-availability is a core concept in Fabric and is implemented by HA groups. An HA group is a set of servers configured with MySQL …

Today marks the release of several exciting pieces of software from Oracle. In addition to MySQL server 5.7.4 DMR, MySQL Fabric is out as a release candidate 1.4.2 and Connector/J 5.1.30 has full support. MySQL Fabric is a new way to implement high-availability and scale-out with MySQL server. It provides a way to group sets of servers into high-availability groups with automatic replication configuration. If scale-out is important, sharding can be defined in terms of these high-availability groups.

To use Connector/J with Fabric, you only need to add the jar to your classpath. If you are still using Java 5, you will need to manually load the com.mysql.fabric.jdbc.FabricMySQLDriver class to register the driver. Fabric-aware connections are made with a JDBC URL of the form jdbc:mysql:fabric://host:port/db. Several connection properties are available to influence the behavior of Fabric-aware connections. You can find the documentation for …

As noted in a previous post, MySQL Connector/Java supports multi-master replication topographies as of version 5.1.27, allowing you to scale read load to slaves while directing write traffic to multi-master (or replication ring) servers.  The new release of version 5.1.28 builds upon this, allowing live management of replication host (single or multi-master) topographies.  This parallels functionality that has long existed for load-balanced connections, and enables users to add or remove hosts – or now promote slaves – for Java applications without requiring application restart.  This post aims to …

MySQL Connector/Java has long had support for replication-aware deployment, allowing a single logical Connection object to effectively “pool” connections to both a master and (potentially multiple) slaves.  This allowed scale-out of read load by distribution of read traffic to slaves, while routing write load to the master.  The JDBC specification provides a nice hook to know what’s read-only traffic – Connection.setReadOnly().  When a boolean value of true is passed, a ReplicationConnection will route further commands a selected slave instance, while values of false trigger routing to the master.  This is sufficient for many simple replication topographies, but not all – most notably, it …

As Tomas announced in his keynote at MySQL Connect 2013, we are working on a brand new product called MySQL Fabric. Along with this release of MySQL Fabric, we are releasing Connector/J 5.1.26 with Fabric support on labs.mysql.com. This is an alpha-quality release that adds support for scalability features in MySQL Fabric. Sharding and read/write splitting are the initial features supported by Connector/J.
In a setup involving read/write splitting or customized sharding, we generally have to duplicate knowledge of this configuration in the client applications. This is done in connection strings specified in configuration files or directly in code. With MySQL Fabric, we can express our system-wide configuration of database servers in a way that it can be accessed by client applications. In cases where this needs to change (and it always does..), the configurations affecting client applications no longer need to be changed. The connector will …

The MySQL Connect content catalog is published, and I’ll be leading a hands-on lab on MySQL Enterprise Features in Practice [HOL9787].  If you have wondered how to get the most out of the features of MySQL Enterprise subscriptions – whether you are an existing Enterprise customer or not – this lab is for you.  We’ll help you understand the benefits of the various components of the MySQL Enterprise subscription as you install, configure, demonstrate and use the …

Over three years ago, I noticed that there was no STATUS counter for COM_PING commands – something that is useful for ensuring proper configuration of JDBC connection pools.  Mark Leith even provided a patch, but it’s never been incorporated.  With the advances PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA makes in MySQL 5.6, that’s OK – a STATUS counter becomes somewhat redundant:

mysql> SELECT SUM(count_star) as pings
    -> FROM events_statements_summary_global_by_event_name
    -> WHERE event_name = 'statement/com/Ping';
+-------+
| pings |
+-------+
|    12 |
+-------+
1 row in set (0.02 sec)

Not only does PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA provide capabilities which mirror the STATUS counters, it really goes well beyond what’s capable there. A global counter is interesting, but …

Many MySQL users are familiar with using slow query logs and tools such as mysqldumpslow to identify poor-performing SQL commands, and MySQL 5.6 introduces new powerful tools in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA.  Both allow you to identify the date/time and the user account from which the command was issued, which is helpful – but if you’re using MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM), you can immediately identify the actual line of code responsible for the SQL command in question.  This happens to be one of my favorite and powerful features of MEM, but it’s frequently overlooked by new and experienced MEM users alike, so I’m writing the post to highlight it.

MySQL Enterprise Monitor, of course, is a commercial product that’s part of the MySQL Enterprise subscription.  But it’s freely-available under 30-day trial terms for evaluation from Oracle Software Delivery Cloud – if …

MySQL Connector/J 5.1.25 has been released, and is available in Community and Enterprise flavors on dev.mysql.com and My Oracle Support, respectively.  I’ve already noted the addition of support for connection attributes for MySQL 5.6 – 5.1.25 adds this functionality.  This release also includes a fix for Bug#68733, which caused the special light-weight ping operation to execute only against the master and currently-selected slave, rather than …

On 29 November last year, SkySQL and Monty Program jointly  announced the release of the so called "MariaDB Client Library for C Applications" and "Maria DB Client Library for Java Applications", which I will call C and JDBC connectors here. You can follow this link to read the press release from SkySQL.

Last week Baron Schwartz posted some findings re the C connector in his blog. Today, another post from Robert Hodges added few details and were looking for answers. I think I can help a bit in understanding what we have released and how the …