Showing entries 1 to 10
Displaying posts with tag: downtime (reset)
Zero-Downtime Cluster Maintenance: Comparing the Procedures for Upgrades versus DB/OS Maintenance

Overview The Skinny

Part of the power of Tungsten Clustering for MySQL / MariaDB is the ability to perform true zero-downtime maintenance, allowing client applications full access to the database layer, while taking out individual nodes for maintenance and upgrades. In this blog post we cover various types of maintenance scenarios, the best practices associated with each type of action, and the key steps to ensure the highest availability.

Important Questions Understand the Environment as a Whole First

There are a number of questions to ask when planning cluster maintenance that are critical to understand before starting.

For example:

  1. What is the cluster topology?
    • Standalone (connectors write to single cluster master)
      Single cluster: …
[Read more]
Take Percona’s One-Click Database Security Downtime Poll

Take Percona’s database security downtime poll.

As Peter Zaitsev mentioned recently in his blog post on database support, the data breach costs can hit both your business reputation and your bottom line. Costs vary depending on the company size and market, but recent studies estimate direct costs ranging in average from $1.6M to 7.01M. Everyone agrees leaving rising security risks and costs unchecked is a recipe for disaster.

Reducing security-based outages doesn’t have a simple answer, but can be a combination of internal and external monitoring, support contracts, enhanced security systems, and a better understanding of …

[Read more]
The value of MySQL Support

Years ago when I worked for the MySQL Support organization at the original MySQL AB, we spoke about MySQL Support as insurance and focused on a value proposition similar to that of car insurance. For your car to be fully covered, you must purchase car insurance before the incident happens – in fact most places around the world require automobile insurance. Similarly with many organizations, any production-use technology might be mandated to have its own insurance in the way of 24/7 support.

I think however this is a very one-sided view that does not capture the full value (and ROI) that a MySQL Support contract with Percona provides. Let’s look at the different dimensions of value it provides based on the different support cases we have received throughout the years.

Reduce and Prevent …

[Read more]
Picking the Right Clustering for MySQL: Cloud-only Services or Flexible Tungsten Clusters? New webinar-on-demand

As businesses head into the cloud, it is tempting to reach for the first product that offers to make database operation as simple as punching a few buttons on a menu.  However, there’s a big difference between firing up cloud database services such as Amazon RDS for testing or development and finding a solution that can handle hundreds of millions of transactions daily. This webinar-on-demand

Set Up & Operate Tungsten Clusters

In this virtual course, you will learn how to get from a single database server to a scalable cluster, or from a brittle MySQL replication system to a transparent, manageable Continuent Tungsten cluster. 

We discuss the benefits of leveraging Continuent Tungsten clustering with MySQL, and walk you through the steps to implement a Continuent Tungsten cluster in Amazon EC2.

Server Ownership Legalities

As I reported via Twitter late last week, we encountered an issue that got some of our mail delivery delayed by about a day and a half. I’ll explain more about what happened as I believe in openness on these matters, and also the experience has educational content for others.

Our mail server doesn’t have direct external interaction, it’s shielded by two relays that handle both the inbound MX and the outbound queue. This setup works remarkably well in terms of exposure to spam and other malicious activity. As previously discussed, it appears that it’s more difficult to make mail server infra more resilient without expending lots more time/effort and infrastructure expenditure. Just because of the way the common tools for mail delivery and imap are built, having two or more of each in a semi-active setup gets quite complex. Complexity is in itself a risk so it has to be considered in relation to the costs and risks of the …

[Read more]
Free webinar on preventing MySQL downtime

I’ll be presenting a free one-hour webinar on preventing downtime in production MySQL servers, in conjunction with the ODTUG. It is scheduled on Thursday, November 10, 2011 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST, and you can register for free.

Here’s an abstract of what you’ll learn:

Everyone wants to prevent database downtime by being proactive, but how effective are the common measures such as inspecting logs and analyzing SQL? To be truly proactive, one must prevent problems, which requires studying and understanding the reasons for downtime. We have analyzed a selection of emergency issues that we have solved, to better understand what types of problems really occur in production environments. The results are somewhat surprising, and will be detailed in this talk. Most incidents we found were not MySQL-specific and will be familiar to Oracle DBAs as well as …

[Read more]
Speaking at Oracle Open World

I’ll be presenting at Oracle Open World on the causes of downtime in MySQL, and how to prevent it. This is a research-based session that presents an easy-to-digest post-mortem of hundreds of emergency issues filed by Percona customers. The real causes and types of downtime surprised me quite a bit, and the preventions run counter to a lot of conventional wisdom. I’ll just give a preview by saying that you should consider it a top priority to monitor how full your disks are! On the other hand, despite the fact that every monitoring tool in existence shows the binary log cache hit rate, not a single emergency in Percona history has ever been attributed to that.

The agenda at OOW is mind-bogglingly huge (see Dave Stokes’s blog post, so here are the full …

[Read more]
Softlayer Cloud: a Scary Story of One Bad Service

Disclaimer: the information in this post is the author’s personal opinion and is not the opinion or policy of his employer.

It was spring 2010 when we decided that even though Softlayer‘s server provisioning system is really great and it takes only a few hours to get a new server when we need it, it is still too long sometimes. We wanted to be able to scale up when needed and do it faster. It was especially critical because we were working hard on bringing up Facebook integration to our site and that project could have dramatically changed our application servers cloud capacity requirements.

What buzzword comes to your mind when we talk about scaling up really fast, sometimes within minutes, not hours or days? Exactly – cloud computing! So, after some initial testing and playing around with Softlayer’s (really young back then) cloud solution …

[Read more]
Another reason to GPL the MySQL docs - the site goes down and documentation is suddenly unavailable.

Fix your licensing model so that mirrors can legally maintain copies of your documentation, so that I'm not left sitting in the dark when your website goes down.

What if Oracle shut MySQL down today? They absolutely could. With the documentation not in the GPL, when Oracle pulls the plug on the websites, well, goodbye docs. It isn't legal to mirror them elsewhere.

Showing entries 1 to 10