Drupal is one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) and is used increasingly in high-visibility sites, such as www.whitehouse.gov. This has brought a lot of attention on how to get the most performance out of Drupal and how to improve the availability of such sites. In this blog series I'll take you through the basics and on through to designing your own HA Drupal site.

But first, we need to understand what the challenges are in getting Drupal (or indeed any CMS) working on multiple servers in such a way as to ensure high availability and performance.

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At Open Query we steer clear of code development for clients. We sometimes advise on code, but as a company we don’t want to be in the programmer role. Naturally we do write scripts and other necessities to do our job.

Assisting with an Open Source project, I encountered three old UDFs. User Defined Functions are native functions that are compiled and then loaded by the server similar to a plugin. As with plugins, compiling can be a pest as it requires some of the server MySQL header files and matching build switches to the server it’s going to be loaded in. Consequentially, binaries cannot be considered safely portable and that means that you don’t really want to have a project rely on UDFs as it can hinder adoption quite severely.

Since MySQL 5.0 we can also

I was reviewing the Percona Live sponsors list the other day and pondering the potential success stories associated with this product or that one…. and as I was preparing to put more thought on the topic, a PlanetMySQL post caught my eye. It was penned by Mike Hogan and titled, “Thoughts on Xeround and Free!”

For some reason the author of that post makes a connection between a free account in a cloud-based service and Open Source software. I think it’s

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Back when the first version of the MariaDB Java Client was released, someone asked in the comments about the performance characteristics of the driver compared to ConnectorJ. I answered with hand-waving, saying that nobody does anything stupid, the performance of the drivers would be roughly the same, but I promised to measure it and tell the world one day. And now that day has come. The day where three MySQL JDBC drivers (ConnectorJ, MariaDB JDBC, and Drizzle JDBC) are compared against each other. Unlike the server, which gets benchmarking attention all the time, there is no standard benchmark for connectors, so I needed to improvise, while trying to keep the overhead of the server minimal. So I did something very primitive to start. I used my two favorite queries:

• DO 1 — this one does not retrieve a result set, and thus can be seen as a small

dm-cache is (albeit still classified “experimental”) is in the just released Linux 3.9 kernel. It deals with generic block devices and uses the device mapper framework. While there have been a few other similar tools flying around, since this one has been adopted into the kernel it looks like this will be the one that you’ll be seeing the most in to the future. It saves sysadmins the hassle of compiling extra stuff for a system.

A typical use is for an SSD to cache a HDD. Similar to a battery backed RAID controller, the objective is to insulate the application from latency caused by the mechanical device, the most laggy part of which is seek time (measured in milliseconds). Giventhe  relatively high storage capacity of an SSD (in the hundreds of GBs), this allows you to mostly disregard the mechanical latency for writes and that’s very useful for

The MariaDB project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the MariaDB Java Client 1.1.2. This is a Stable (GA) release. See the Release Notes and Changelog for detailed information on this release and the About the MariaDB Java Client page in the AskMonty Knowledgebase for general information about the client.

Download MariaDB Java Client 1.1.2

Release Notes

Last week I had to present a tutorial at Percona Live 2013, a presentation at SkySQL’s MySQL & Cloud Database Solution Day and last but not least, a presentation on a Saturday morning at Linuxfest Northwest. It wasn’t easy, but giving the presentations after our announcement early in the week about going open source was very exciting given the

Many developers use master-slave replication to solve a number of different problems, including problems with performance, supporting the backup of different databases, and as a part of a larger solution to alleviate system failures. Traditionally, master-slave replication is done with real servers, but it can also be done with cloud database servers. This guest post from Jelastic (originally published here) describes how to set up MariaDB master-slave replication using their Jelastic PaaS (Platform as a Service).

Replication Overview

Master-slave replication enables data from one database server (the master) to be replicated to one or more other database

From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2013-04-30_MariaDB, this installment of Fedora’s Test Day focuses on the replacement of MySQL with MariaDB. If you’re a Fedora (or RHEL or CentOS user), do take a peek at the page and see if you can pitch in – it might be a little bit of work for you, but with great benefits in terms of getting the MariaDB performance and features, and specifically on the day the Fedora crowd have extra people on the case to track and address issues you might find, so it’s an ideal opportunity to upgrade on a development or test-prod environment!

The MariaDB project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 10.0.2. This is an alpha release. See the release notes and changelog for details.

Download MariaDB 10.0.2

Release Notes  Changelog  Overview of 10.0

APT and YUM Repository Configuration Generator

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I enjoyed Stewart Smith’s MySQL storage engine blog last week. In it he noted “I cannot emphasize how much more interesting TokuDB would be if it were open source.” Well, with our open source announcement yesterday, hopefully we are getting interesting.

We wanted to thank everyone for the great feedback. Here is a sampling from some of the forums where dialogue is occurring:

Reddit:

BrianAtDTS: “With this update, this puts MySQL in

SkySQL has signed a merger agreement with Monty Program Ab, creators of the popular MariaDB database. Read more about it, as it features important tidbits from Patrik Sallner (CEO, SkySQL Ab), Simon Phipps (CEO, MariaDB Foundation), and Michael “Monty” Widenius (CTO, MariaDB Foundation).

A key takeaway is that SkySQL will work alongside & collaborate closely with the MariaDB Foundation, plus continue to invest in the development of the MariaDB server.

World’s leading MySQL database development & support experts reunite

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This is a nice blog post from Asher Feldman, Site Architect, Wikipedia on how Wikipedia Adopts MariaDB. If you’re using English or German Wikipedia, or using Wikidata, you’re currently being served by MariaDB 5.5.