Sometimes it is desired to use particular software versions in production, and not necessary the latest ones. There may be several reasons for that, where I think the most common is when a new version should spend some time in testing or a staging environment before getting to production. In theory each new version is supposed to be better as usually it contains a handful of bug fixes and even new or improved functionality. However there is also a risk of some regression or a new bug introduction as a side effect of code changes.

Quite often DBAs want the same MySQL version to be installed on all database instances, regardless of what actually is the latest version available in the software provider’s repository. There are several ways to achieve this:
* download specific version packages manually and then install them,
* have custom local repository mirror where you decide when and which version gets there, and just update …

A bit of history

The latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, one of the most popular and respected Linux distributions in the server market, was released in June 2014, followed by CentOS 7 and Oracle Linux releases in July of the same year.

There are very interesting changes for database administrators in these new releases, among which I would like to highlight the fact that installer now chooses XFS as its filesystem by default, which substitutes ext4 as the preferred format for local data storage. Red …

I was really pleased to see the announcement by Oracle MySQL yum repositories that they have now produced a yum repository from where the MySQL RPMs they provide can be downloaded. This makes keeping up to date much easier. Many companies setup internal yum repositories with the software they need as then updating servers is much easier and can be done with a simple command. For many people at home that means you set this up once and don’t need to check for updates and do manual downloads, but can do a quick yum update xxxx and you get the latest version. Great!  This new yum repository only covers RHEL6 did not include RHEL5 which is not yet end of life and still used by me and probably quite a lot of other people. I filed bug#70773 to ask for RHEL5 support to be …

One type of question we get very often (even in the form of filed bugs!) is how to switch from stock MySQL to Percona Server or switch from Percona Server 5.5 to Percona XtraDB Cluster using yum, but à la apt-get, i.e. having yum handle the replace.

In its simplest form, yum cannot replace a package¹ for another like apt-get does:

# yum -q -q install Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-server
Error: Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-server conflicts with Percona-Server-server-55
Error: Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-client conflicts with Percona-Server-client-55
Error: Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-shared conflicts with Percona-Server-shared-55


One solution for this is to manually uninstall …

A fairy tale

Once upon a time I did an operating system upgrade, a minor one that should do no harm, but just get me up to date by fixing any bugs in the version I had been using. It seemed like a good idea.

All seemed to be fine. I use a package provided by an external vendor and not the one produced by the operating system provider as this vendor provides a newer version of the package and I need that. The vendor has to make his package fit in the os environment his package is built for and normally does a pretty good job.

I use automation to build my systems and when I built a new one some issues appeared. Related to the new version of the OS the provider had enhanced one of his packages and the installation pulled in new dependencies. The install of the external package I use then broke as it conflicted with the new dependency provided by the OS.  While a workaround is possible: uninstall …

So MariaDB 10.0.3 Alpha is out. Download it and remember to provide feedback.

When you run SHOW ENGINES by default, you don’t get CassandraSE or the CONNECT engine. Make sure you do a yum install MariaDB-cassandra-engine and a yum install MariaDB-connect-engine. 

You will run into conflicts if you had an older MariaDB-CassandraSE engine (so yum remove MariaDB-CassandraSE).

Once you’ve got the packages installed, you can either install the plugin or just restart mysqld.

Happy testing!

…

Here’s a solution to the not-so-long-standing issue of the Percona yum repo being broken for the CentOS 6 x86_64 version of the Percona-toolkit package. The repo listing is reporting an older version of the RPM which is not available on the site, so to fix this you just have to download the newer file and tell yum to add it locally. The side benefit is that you can use Yum to manage the RPM without adding the Percona repo, since the default settings for their repo could/have/had caused conflicts with Base Repo versions of MySQL packages; the Percona repo instructions set ‘enabled=1′ — not a great idea if you’re not setup to use the Yum priorities method of repo weighting.

So, if you see this after installing the repo via the instructions on their site:
Downloading Packages:
http://repo.percona.com/centos/6/os/x86_64/percona-toolkit-2.1.9-1.noarch.rpm: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 22 – “The requested URL returned …

yum

It’s often pain to guess package names when you need to install stuff on, lets say, CentOS. So there is a list, although maybe not full, of what I needed to get another VM build and run MariaDB server and to execute at least some tests on it (all done via yum install):

cmake
gcc
ncurses-devel
bison
g++
gcc-c++
aclocal
automake
libtool
perl-DBD-MySQL
gdb
libaio-devel
openssl-devel

Same in one line, for lazy me:
sudo yum install cmake gcc ncurses-devel bison g++ gcc-c++ perl-DBD-MySQL gdb libaio-devel openssl-devel

To install bzr (if it’s not in the official repo):

su -c ‘rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-2.noarch.rpm’
(check the architecture)

and then can use yum install
bzr

Another story (taken …

You cannot use Yum to an unregistered Linux by default after installation. As a workaround, you will have to create a repo from your installation CD or ISO file.

1. Mount your DVD/CDROM. Run this command from shell.

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt


2. Or if you have no DVD/CDROM, you can copy your ISO file to the server and mount like this.

mount -o loop -t iso9660 yourisofile.iso /mnt


3. Change directory to /mnt and run this command

yum clean all


5. Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/iso.repo. Use nano or vi.

nano /etc/yum.repos.d/iso.repo


6. Paste below and save.

[local]
name=Local CD Repo
baseurl=file:///mnt
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///mnt/RPM-GPG-KEY


Now try installing using …

Until now, MariaDB 5.2 was lacking a yum repository for easy installs and upgrades. It is now available, thanks to OurDelta.

Just follow our very simple installation instructions.