Deployment and management your database environment can be a tedious task. It's very common nowadays to use tools for automating your deployment to make these tasks easier. Automation solutions such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or SaltStack are just some of the ways to achieve these goals.

This blog will show you how to use Puppet to deploy a Galera Cluster (specifically Percona XtraDB Cluster or PXC) utilizing ClusterControl Puppet Modules. This module makes the deployment, setup, and configuration easier than coding yourself from scratch. You may also want to check out one of our previous blogs about deploying a Galera Cluster using Chef,  “How to Automate Deployment of MySQL Galera Cluster Using S9S CLI and Chef.”

Our …

Recently, PeterZ pointed a huge difference in memory usage of MySQL 8.0 compare to MySQL 5.7. This can be an issue for small instances if the same configuration for buffers like the buffer pool are not changed.

As explained in Peter’s article, this can lead to the awakening of the so feared OOM Killer !

MorganT, pointed accurately in his comment what is the source of such difference and how this was then caused by the new instrumentation added in MySQL 8.0.

Nothing is free, even as a …

Author: Robert Agar

Tuning database performance is a complicated task that can be a thorn in the side of the database team. There are many interconnected components and environmental aspects that come under consideration when attempting to optimize the performance of your database systems. A DBA can be hard-pressed to determine where to begin their optimization efforts.

An initial investigation may concentrate on the network and hardware on which the database is running. These inquiries may uncover issues that can be easily identified and addressed. It may be a simple matter of adding some disk space or upgrading memory on the database’s server. You might be able to move the database to a less-used network segment to improve the response time when satisfying user requests. Maybe there are conflicting applications or processes on the same server that are impacting the availability of resources to power the …

Complex, inflexible architectures, redundancy and out-of-date technology, are common problems for companies facing data to cloud migration. 

We look to the “clouds,” hoping that we will find there a magic solution to improve operational speed and performance, better workload and scalability, less prone and less complicated architectures. We hope to make our database administrator's life more comfortable. But is it really always a case? 

As more enterprises are moving to the cloud, the hybrid model is actually becoming more popular. The hybrid model is seen as a safe model for many businesses. 

In fact, it's challenging to do a heart transplant and port everything over immediately. Many companies are doing a slow migration that usually takes a year or even maybe forever until …

Disable SELinux? Think again!

SELinux is always a complicated topic. If you search this on the web, most people will advise just disabling it, but that may not be acceptable from a security point of view in your organization. In this case, we are going to see how to solve an issue with SELinux and MySQL log rotation

We had configured log rotation as per this post. The scripts seemed to work perfectly when running manually. However, when running under cron they would fail to run. Since there were no other errors in the logs, eventually I tracked that down to SELinux. What I found is that SELinux default policies prevent logrotate daemon from making the changes to files outside of /var/log. In this case, MySQL logs were living on /var/lib/mysql so that was clearly the problem.

Figuring out SELinux

The first thing to do when debugging a …

Multi-Valued Indexes are going to change the way you think about using JSON data and the way you architect your data. Before MySQL 8.0.17 you could store data in JSON arrays but trying to search on that data in those embedded arrays was tricky and usually required a full table scan.  But now it is easy and very quick to search and to access the data in JSON arrays.
Multi-Valued IndexesA Multi-Valued Index (MVI) is a secondary index defined on a column made up of an array of values.  We are all used to traditional indexes where you have one value per index entry, a 1:1 ratio.  A MVI can have multiple records for each index record.  So you can have multiple postal codes, phone numbers, or other attributes from one JSON document indexed for quick access. See Multi-Valued Indexes for details.

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In my roles as a DBA at various companies, I generally found the tooling to be quite lacking. Everything from metrics collection, alerting, backup management; they were either missing, incomplete or implemented poorly. DBA-Tools was born from a desire to build backup tools that supported my needs in smaller/non-cloud environments. As BASH is easily the most common shell available out there on systems running MySQL® or MariaDB®, it was an easy choice.

How DBA-Tools came to be

While rebuilding my home-lab two years ago, I decided I wanted some simple tools for my database environment. Being a fan of NOT re-inventing the wheel, I thought I would peruse GitHub and Gitlab to see what others have put together. Nothing I saw looked quite like what I wanted. They all hit one or more of the checkboxes I wanted, but never all of them.

My checklist when searching …

While we often run MySQL on larger scale systems in Production for Test and Dev, sometimes we want to run MySQL on the tiniest cloud instances possible or just run it on our laptops. In these cases, MySQL 8 and MySQL 5.7 memory consumption is quite important.

In comparing MySQL 8 vs MySQL 5.7, you should know that MySQL 8 uses more memory. Basic tests on a 1GB VM with MySQL 8 and MySQL 5.7 (actually they’re Percona Server versions) running the same light workload, I see the following vmstat output:

MySQL 5.7 vmstat output

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ------cpu-----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
 4  0  65280  71608  58352 245108    0    0  2582  3611 1798 8918 18  9 11 33 30
 4  0  65280  68288  58500 247512    0    0  2094  2662 1769 8508 19  9 13 30 29
 3  1  65280  67780  58636 249656    0    0  2562  3924 1883 9323 20  9  7 37 27
 4  1  65280 …

Today I am going to explain ways to execute shell or bash commands from mysql clients or stored procedure and function. There are basically 2 method to do so: Method 1: Use MySQL Client inbuilt feature  To run single command: \! command or system command. eg \! uptime or system command  To get terminal \! bash or \! sh
Method 2: Deploy external plugin (lib_mysqludf_sys) Step 1: Download lib_mysqludf_sys from github:

git clone https://github.com/mysqludf/lib_mysqludf_sys.git 

Step 2: Install libmysqlclient15-dev, for Ubuntu you can use:

apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev 

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FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 0.9.2 of its popular FromDual Ops Center for MariaDB and MySQL focmm.

The FromDual Ops Center for MariaDB and MySQL (focmm) helps DBA's and System Administrators to manage MariaDB and MySQL database farms. Ops Center makes DBA and Admins life easier!

The main task of Ops Center is to support you in your daily MySQL and MariaDB operation tasks. More information about FromDual Ops Center you can find here.

Download

The new FromDual Ops Center for MariaDB and MySQL (focmm) can be downloaded from here. How to install and use focmm is documented in the …