As your organization transforms to embrace the wealth of digital information that is becoming available, the capability to store, manage and consume this data in any given format or product becomes an increasing burden for operations.

How does your organization handle the request, “I need to use product Z to store data for my new project?” There are several responses I have experienced first-hand with clients.

1. Enforce the company policy that Products O and S are all that can be used.
2. Ignore the request.
3. Consider the request, but antagonize your own internal organization with long wait times (e.g. months or years) and with repeated delays to evaluate a product you simply do not want to support.
4. Do whatever the developers say, they know best.

Unfortunately I have …

So you want to contribute to OpenStack? I can help!

For the last year or so I have been involved with OpenStack and more specifically the Trove (DBaaS) project as sort of an ambassador for Percona, contributing bits of knowledge, help and debugging wherever I could and thought I would share some of my experience with others that wanted to get involved with OpenStack development, documentation, testing, etc. Getting started with OpenStack contributions is also the idea behind my talk next month at Percona OpenStack Live 2015. (Percona Live attendees have access to OpenStack Live)

Back at the last OpenStack Conference and Design Summit in Paris last November, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the two-day …

MySQL introduced the Event Scheduler in version 5.1.6. The Event Scheduler is a MySQL-level “cron job”, which will run events inside MySQL. Up until now, this was not a very popular feature, however, it has gotten more popular since the adoption of Amazon RDS – as well as similar MySQL database as a service offerings where there is no OS level.

What is important to understand about the Event Scheduler is that it does not have any protection against multiple execution (neither does linux cron). Let’s imagine you have created an event that executes every 10 seconds, but the logic inside the event (i.e. queries or stored procedure call) can …

I spent the last 4 years at SkySQL/MariaDB working on versions of MySQL that could be “suitable for the cloud”. I strongly believed that the world needed a version of MySQL that could work in the cloud even better than its comparable version on bare metal. Users and administrators wanted to benefit from the use of cloud infrastructures and at the same time they wanted to achieve the same performance and overall stability of their installations on bare metal. Unfortunately, ACID-compliant databases in the cloud suffer from the issues that any centrally controlled and strictly persistent system can get when hosted on highly distributed and natively stateless infrastructures.
In this post I am not going to talk about the improvements needed for MySQL in the cloud - I will tackle this topic in a future post. Today I'd like to focus on the business side of RDS and Aurora. 
In the last 4 years I had endless discussions over …

MySQL database usage is popular in OpenStack. Core OpenStack services for Compute (Nova), Storage (Cinder), Neutron (Networking), Image (Glance) and Identity (Keystone) all use MySQL database.

MySQL – as the world’s most popular database, runs inside OpenStack Virtual Machines and serves as database backend to OpenStack cloud based applications. The MySQL instances can be configured to run in virtual machines manually (by simply installing MySQL inside a VM and running it) or can be created in an on-demand fashion by OpenStack Database-as-a-Service (Trove).

In either case, the MySQL data is mission-critical. OpenStack cloud administrators and cloud guests/tenants need the ability to backup and restore their MySQL databases. mysqldump is traditional way of doing MySQL backups and restores. However, based on previous experiences of the MySQL community, it is widely known that mysqldump has …

Founded in 1998, Rackspace has evolved over the years to address the way customers are using data – and more specifically, databases. The San Antonio-based company is fueling the adoption of cloud computing among organizations large and small.

Today Rackspace is doubling down on open source database technologies. Why? Because that’s where the industry is heading, according to Sean Anderson, Manager of Data Services at Rackspace. The company, he said, created a separate business unit of 100+ employees focused solely on database workloads.

The key technologies under the hood include both relational databases (e.g., MySQL, Percona Server, and MariaDB) and NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, Redis, and Apache Hadoop).

Last July Rackspace …

October 9, 2014 By Severalnines

Installing, configuring, deploying databases and performing repetitive administrative tasks are all part of a DBA’s or sysadmin’s job. This can get pretty repetitive and overwhelming if you are part of a centralized IT team, running multiple databases for your organization’s different departments, or a managed hosting provider responsible for setting up and operating databases for external clients. One way to get out of this ‘manual, repetitive task’ business is through a Database as a Service (DBaaS).

DBaaS is a way of delivering database functionality as a service to one or more consumers. A DBaaS platform would provide automated procedures for database deployment, monitoring, backups, recovery/repair, scaling, security/multi-tenancy, etc. This type of automation is especially useful where agility is needed, e.g. for systems that require elasticity by scaling out or scaling back at short …

Percona Server and Percona XtraDB Cluster provide high-performance alternatives for MySQL users. We have also seen rapidly growing interest in these solutions in the OpenStack community where higher performance and high availability are crucial. Many OpenStack users are adopting these solutions but we’ve also seen demand from companies creating OpenStack distros. For example, Percona XtraDB Cluster is now certified for the RHEL OSP (OpenStack Platform) and is included in the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release. …

In a previous post, my colleague Dimitri Vanoverbeke discussed at a high level the concepts of database as a service (DBaaS), OpenStack and OpenStack’s implementation of a DBaaS, Trove. Today I’d like to delve a bit further into Trove and discuss where it fits in, and who benefits.

Just to recap, Trove is OpenStack’s implementation of a database as a service for its cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And as the mission statement declares, the Trove project seeks to provide a scalable and reliable cloud database service providing functionality for both relational and non-relational database engines. With the current release of Icehouse, the technology has begun to show maturity providing both stability and a rich feature set.

…

We’ll be publishing a series of posts on OpenStack and Trove over the next few weeks, diving into their usage and purpose. For readers who are already familiar with these technologies, there should be no doubt as to why we are incredibly excited about them, but for those who aren’t, consider this a small introduction to the basics and concepts.

What is Database as a Service (DBaaS)?
In a nutshell, DBaaS – as it is frequently referred to – is a loose moniker to the concept of providing a managed cloud-based database environment accessible by users, applications or developers. Its aim is to provide a full-fledged database environment, while minimizing the administrative turmoil and pains of managing the surrounding infrastructure.

Real life example: Imagine you are working on a new application that has to be accessible from multiple regions. Building and maintaining a large multiregion …