Pivotal launches. SkySQL and Mony Program merge. And much, much more

Our report on the changes in the MySQL ecosystem is now available for 451 clients and non-clients alike at bit.ly/451mysql

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) April 25, 2013

For 451 Research clients: VMware expands Serengeti’s horizons with updated Hadoop virtualization project bit.ly/17muQFI

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) April 26, 2013

For 451 Research clients: SkySQL, Monty Program merge to support MariaDB following formation of MariaDB Foundation bit.ly/10dsdjf

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I’m sitting here in the lounge at SFO thinking back on the last week, the majority of which has been spent meeting my new workmates and attending the Percona MySQL conference.

For me it has been as much of a family reunion as it has been about seeing the wonderful things going on in MySQL.

Having joined Continuent last month after an ‘absence’ in NoSQL land of almost 2.5 years, joining the MySQL community again just felt like coming home after a long absence. And that’s no bad thing. On a very personal level it was great to see so many of my old friends, many of whom were not only pleased to see me, but pleased to see me working back in the MySQL fold. Evidently many people think this is where I belong.

What was great to see is that the MySQL community is alive and

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It was a busy day at Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. After the regular sessions, there were the traditional MySQL Community Awards, and two entities close to me were among the winners.

• My company, Continuent won the award as Corporate Contributor of the year;
• My pet project of the last 7 years, MySQL Sandbox, won the award as Application of the year 2013.

Thanks to the MySQL community for these awards. They give me (and my colleagues) a goos feeling of appreciation.

The day was even more successful for four major occurrences that contributed to my wellness:

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For me, the biggest news in the last 24 hours so far has been:

SkySQL merges with Monty Program, developers of MariaDB. This of course affects me directly and leads to a change in affiliation in a few months.

TokuDB goes opensource. I think this is really big news. Beyond just the fact that it can now be a storage engine in the main MariaDB tree, I love the work they’re doing to extend it to be an engine for MongoDB as well.

Continuent

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I’ve just completed my first month here at Continuent, strangely back into the MySQL ecosystem which I have been working in for some time before I joined CouchOne, and then Couchbase, two and half years ago. Making the move back to MySQL is both an experience, and somehow, comfortable…

Continuent produce technology that makes for easier replication between MySQL servers and, more importantly, more flexible solutions when you need to scale out by providing connector and management functionality for your MySQL cluster. That means that you can easily backup, add slaves, and create complex replication scenarios such as multi-master, and even multiple-site, multiple-master topologies. This functionality is split over two products, Continuent Tungsten, which is the cluster management product, and the open source Tungsten Replicator, which provides the basic replication

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In the first part of this article we examined the types of conflicts and their causes. In this part, we will analyse some of the methods available to deal with conflicts.

Pessimistic locking (or: conflicts won't happen)

Applicability: synchronous clusters with 2pc

We've covered this topic in the previous article, but it's worth repeating. If you use a synchronous cluster, you don't have conflicts. For example, MySQL Cluster ensures consistent data with updates coming from different nodes. However, MySQL Cluster is not a replacement for a MySQL server, and it has severe limitations.

Optimistic locking

Applicability: synchronous clusters without 2pc (Galera)

Conflicting transactions proceed on different

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What is a conflict?

Readers of this blog know that one of my favorite tools, Tungsten Replicator, can easily create multi-master replication topologies, such as all-masters, star, fan-in. While this is good news for system designers and ambitious DBAs, it also brings some inconvenience. When you allow updates to happen in more than one master, you risk having conflicts. You may have heard this term before. For the sake of clarity, let's define what conflicts are, before analyzing each case in detail.

You have a conflict when several sources (masters) update concurrently the same data in asynchronous replication.

It's important to stress that this happens with asynchronous replication. In a truly synchronous cluster, where all data is kept consistent through

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The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 is almost 1 month away. It's time to start planning, set the expectations, and decide what to attend. This post will give a roundup of some of the sessions that I recommend attending and I look forward to.

First, the unexpected!

After much talk and disbelief, here they come! Oracle (http://www.mysql.com) engineers will participate to the Percona Live conference. This is wonderful! Their participation was requested by the organizers, by the attendees, and by community advocates, who all told the Oracle management how important it is to be in this conference. Finally, they have

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Within hours of my post about meeting the MySQL community in Barcelona, we got several offers to help, and within one day, an event was created and agreed upon.

Thanks!

Today the event was posted at Evenbrite. It will take place on Tuesday, November 13th, at 7pm. It will be a one hour talk about State of the art in MySQL high availability and replication, followed by one hour of Q&A, networking, beer, and snacks.

Registration is necessary, because the seats are limited. If you want to attend, you should register as soon as possible!

Update: With the enthusiastic responses that we have received from Barcelona, there is now an event defined at Evenbrite. If you are in Barcelona on November 13th, please register!

My company, Continuent, will have an engineering meeting in Barcelona, Spain, from November 11th to 16th.

We are meeting because, as we all work from home, we need to get in touch face-to-face at least a few times a year, and every time we try choosing a nice, inspiring place where we can both work and relax. This time, the choice went to Barcelona, which happens to be one of my favorite towns.

Now comes the community. We build software that is mainly directed to MySQL users (although we also dedicate much effort to replication to and from Oracle, Postgres,

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I have been asked many times to provide an easy way of deploying fan-in and star schema replication schemas. So far, I have been delayed by more pressing duties.

Now the time has come. Since we are about to release a new version of Tungsten Replicator, I made the effort of putting together the steps for an easy deployment.

Recipes

The package (with downloads and svn code available at Tungsten-Replicator Toolbox) includes some juicy goodies. There are recipes to install.

• Master/slave, the classic replication topology. Nothing fancy, but with the tools mentioned in the next section, it becomes as valuable as the other topologies.
• All-masters. This is the Tungsten no-SPOF topology. Every node is a master,

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As part of a recent engagement, I described the relative products to manage a MySQL pair (i.e. an Active/Passive MySQL masters configuration). This included the steps to undertake a controlled failover for supporting software maintenance using manual procedures. The upcoming Effective MySQL: Replication Techniques in Depth book details each step and all conditions to review over a dozen pages. While the steps are straightforward and generally well known, scripting this for your environment takes a certain amount of work to ensure your information is correct, and application connectivity loss is kept to a minimum.

In Continuent Tungsten (which I have just been reviewing these past few weeks), I achieved the same result with a single command.

$ echo "switch" |

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After a long pause in the speaking game, I am back.

It's since April that I haven't been on stage, and it is now time to resume my public duties.

• I will speak at MySQL Connect in San Francisco, just at the start of Oracle Open World, with a talk on MySQL High Availability: Power and Usability. It is about the cool technology that is keeping me busy here at Continuent, which can make life really easy for DBAs. This talk will be a demo fest. If you are attending MySQL Connect, you should see it!
• A happy return for me. On October 27th I will talk about open source databases and the pleasures of command line operations at

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It is public news now that Continuent has three new hires. I am particularly pleased with the news, as we are improving the team in three different directions:

• Services and management, with Ronald Bradford, with whom we have crossed paths several times, first in the MySQL community activities, then as colleagues at MySQL AB, and again in community cyberspace.
• Development, with Ludovic Launer, a senior developer with a long experience in development and software architecture. This is an excellent injection of new blood for our development team.
• Sales, with Robert Noyes, who has worked in enterprise sales for 25 years, and comes at the right moment to reinforce our business in the moment of its biggest growth that I have seen since I joined the company.

Welcome to our new colleagues!

This month I have joined the team at Continuent. No stranger to the MySQL ecosystem, Continuent provides replication and clustering technology for managing data between MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Vertica and a growing list of data stores.

I have known many of the team at Continuent for some time, and will again be joining Giuseppe Maxia from our days at MySQL Inc/AB starting back in 2006.

I am looking forward to taking the hard work out of administration of MySQL systems with the simplicity of Continuent Tungsten, simplifying tasks including automatic failover, multi-master and geo cluster redundancy to a single command.

Catch me speaking at the upcoming

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Working with replication, you come across many topologies, some of them sound and established, some of them less so, and some of them still in the realm of the hopeless wishes. I have been working with replication for almost 10 years now, and my wish list grew quite big during this time. In the last 12 months, though, while working at Continuent, some of the topologies that I wanted to work with have moved from the cloud of wishful thinking to the firm land of things that happen. My quest for star replication starts with the most common topology. One master, many slaves.

Fig 1. Master/Slave topology

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If you love a software product, you should try to improve it, and not be afraid of criticizing it. This principle has guided me with MySQL (where I have submitted many usability bugs, and discussed interface with developers for years), and it proves true for Tungsten Replicator as well. When I started working at Continuent, while I was impressed by the technology, I found the installation procedure and the product logs quite discouraging. I would almost say disturbing. Fortunately, my colleagues have agreed on my usability focus, and we can enjoy some tangible improvements. I have already mentioned the new installation procedure, which requires just one command to install a full master/slave cluster. I would like to show how you can  [Read more...]

In a few weeks, I will be on the road, for an intense set of presentations in the USA.

San Francisco, April 7th

I will start the tour at the San Francisco MySQL User Group. On April 7, at 6pm I will talk about Advanced MySQL replication for the masses. This talk will explore topics such as bi-directional replication, multiple sources, parallel replication, seamless failover, with the help of Tungsten replicator.

Santa Clara, April 11, 12

The MySQL conference starts on Monday, April 11th, with several three-hour tutorials.

• April 11, 9:00am

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