This week in Support was busy enough for me. Among other things I had to study all possible reasons (other than obvious query cache impact) for queries hanging in "query end" status and noted Bug #80652 related to binlog group commit and fixed in MySQL 5.7.17+ and 8.0.1+ only. The case I had to review was related to Galera though, and I suggest you to note that "query end" may be related to Galera replication stall. Studying this path further soon brought lp:1197771 - "Cluster stalls while distributing transaction" to my attention again, so I asked about proper status for it on Facebook. As it happens way too often recently, I've got few 'Likes" but no further comments, neither …

This is a "Howto" kind of post, and some speculations and historical references aside, it will show you how to build MariaDB ColumnStore (current version 1.0.9) from GitHub source, how to install and configure it for basic usage, as well as how to resolve some minor problems you may get in the process. Keep reading and eventually you'll get the real Howto below :)

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I try not to care about any software issues besides good old MySQL, InnoDB storage engine internals, query optimization and some MyRocks or a little bit of …

This week one of MariaDB Support customers asked how to find what thread had executed FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK (FTWRL) and thus blocked all changes to data. I decided to list several ways to find this out (as eventually customer wanted to know how to find this out not only in MariaDB 10.1, but also in MySQL 5.6 etc).

Let me start with a quick summary. I know the following ways (other that having all queries logged in general query log, slow log, by some audit plugin or at client side, and checking the log) to find the thread that executed FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK successfully:

1. In MariaDB starting from 10.0.7 you can use METADATA_LOCK_INFO plugin.
2. In MySQL starting from 5.7 you can use …

In my previous working environment it was typical to consider MariaDB Server as just a set of "random" storage engines mixed together, sometimes for unclear reasons and with questionable extra value. But even at that times I was already impressed by some features of one of the engines supported only by MariaDB, CONNECT. PIVOT table type specifically was of interest in a couple of customer cases I had to work on, but I quickly found out that the engine does not work with Oracle's MySQL or Percona Server, and thus had to forget about it for some time.

Recently while working in MariaDB I've got several more chances to deal with some new CONNECT use cases (and some related problems, that ended up mostly minor or caused by ignorance). This engine …

Last year I started to explore MyRocks, that is, RocksDB used as a storage engine with MySQL. So far I had to use Facebook's MySQL 5.6 to do this. I could try to use some specific development branches of MariaDB (or maybe even Percona Server) for this, but I preferred to wait until the engine is included into a main branch by the company I work for. Recently this happened, and now you can get RocksDB loaded and working in main MariaDB 10.2 branch. In this blog post I am going to explain how to build it from source and do some basic checks.

I was updating my MariaDB local repository on my Ubuntu 14.04 netbook, with 10.2 branch already checked out (do git checkout 10.2 if …

Oprofile was widely used for MySQL profiling on Linux in the past. But since 2010 and 2.6.31 Linux kernels another profiler, perf, gets increasing popularity. It uses performance counters (CPU hardware registers that count hardware events such as instructions executed) subsystem in Linux. perf is capable of lightweight profiling. It is included in the Linux kernel, under tools/perf (so features available depends on kernel version), and is frequently updated and enhanced.

So, probably perf is the future of profiling on Linux and it makes sense to discuss its basic usage for profiling MySQL servers. For detailed discussions of features provided, numerous examples (not related to MySQL) and links I suggest to read …

In my previous post I've presented a list of bugs reported by famous MySQL developers, DBAs, users and support engineers who used oprofile to find the problem or root cause of the problem they studied. I assume that some of my readers would like to follow their steps and try to use this tool while working on MySQL performance problems. Bug reports I mentioned contain outputs and, rarely, just some commands used. That's why I decided to write a kind of a basic "Howto" document. The tool does have a detailed enough manual, but few basic steps for quick use of oprofile to study MySQL-related problems should still help. At least I had always considered …

One of the most requested features for InnoDB cluster has been Windows support that we have now delivered as part of the InnoDB Cluster 5.7.17 Preview Release 2. This blog post will show you how to get your InnoDB cluster running on your MS Windows 10 64bit system.…

Traditionally, setting up high availability (HA) in MySQL has been a challenging task, especially for people without advanced knowledge of MySQL. From understanding concepts and technologies, to the tooling, specific commands and files to execute and edit, there’s a lot of things you need to know even when planning a test deployment (the Quick Start Guide for Group Replication should give you an idea).…

Historically I do not care much about MariaDB's MaxScale, at least since I know how to build it from source when needed. But, as a support engineer who work at MariaDB, sometimes I have to deal with problems related to MaxScale, and this week it happened so that I had to explain what to do to implement automatic restarts of MaxScale "daemon" in case of crashes on RHEL 6.x.

In the process I had found out that two of my most often used Linux distributions, CentOS 6.x and Ubuntu 14.04, actually use Upstart, so good old System V's init tricks and scripts work there only partially and only because somebody cared to integrate them into this "new" …