“The single most important lesson I’ve learned is to keep it simple. I find designers sometimes deliver over-complex, generic solutions that could (in theory) do anything, but in reality are remarkably difficult to operate, and often misunderstood.”–John Ryan

I have interviewed John Ryan, Data Warehouse Solution Architect (Director) at UBS.

RVZ

Q1. You are an experienced Data Warehouse architect, designer and developer. What are the main lessons you have learned in your career?

John Ryan: The single most important lesson I’ve learned is to keep it simple. I find designers sometimes deliver over-complex, generic solutions that could (in theory) do anything, but in reality are remarkably difficult to operate, and often misunderstood. I believe this stems from a lack of understanding of the …

I promised to do a pricing post on the Amazon RDS Aurora MySQL pricing, so here we go.  All pricing is noted in USD (we’ll explain why)

We compared pricing of equivalent EC2+EBS server instances, and verified our calculation model with Amazon’s own calculator and examples.  We use the pricing for Australia (Sydney data centre). Following are the relevant Amazon pricing pages from which we took the pricing numbers, formulae, and calculation examples:

• Amazon EC pricing (on demand)
• Amazon EBS pricing
• Amazon RDS Aurora pricing (on demand)
• Amazon AWS calculator tool …

In Amazon space, any EC2 or Service instance can “disappear” at any time.  Depending on which service is affected, the service will be automatically restarted.  In EC2 you can choose whether an interrupted instance will be restarted, or left shutdown.

For an Aurora instance, an interrupted instance is always restarted. Makes sense.

The restart timing, and other consequences during the process, are noted in our post on Aurora Failovers.

Aurora Testing Limitations

As mentioned earlier, we love testing “uncontrolled” failovers.  That is, we want to be able to pull any plug on any service, and see that the environment as a whole continues to do its job.  We can’t do that with Aurora, because we can’t control the essentials:

• power button;
• reset switch;
…

Right now Aurora only allows a single master, with up to 15 read-only replicas.

Master/Replica Failover

We love testing failure scenarios, however our options for such tests with Aurora are limited (we might get back to that later).  Anyhow, we told the system, through the RDS Aurora dashboard, to do a failover. These were our observations:

Role Change Method

Both master and replica instances are actually restarted (the MySQL uptime resets to 0).

This is quite unusual these days, we can do a fully controlled role change in classic asynchronous replication without a restart (CHANGE MASTER TO …), and Galera doesn’t have read/write roles as such (all instances are technically writers) so it doesn’t need role changes at all.

Failover Timing

Failover between running instances takes about 30 seconds.  This is in line with information provided in the …

Our clients operate on a variety of platforms, and RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service) Aurora has received quite a bit of attention in recent times. On behalf of our clients, we look beyond the marketing, and see what the technical architecture actually delivers.  We will address specific topics in individual posts, this time checking out what the Aurora architecture means for write and caching behaviour (and thus performance).

What is RDS Aurora?

First of all, let’s declare the baseline.  MySQL Aurora is not a completely new RDBMS. It comprises a set of Amazon modifications on top of stock Oracle MySQL 5.6 and 5.7, implementing a different replication mechanism and some other changes/additions.  While we have some information (for instance from the “deep dive” by AWS VP Anurag Gupta), the source code of the Aurora modifications …

via GIPHY I was at a dinner party recently, and talking with some colleagues. I had worked with them years back on Oracle systems. One colleague Maria said she really enjoyed my newsletter. Join 38,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. She went on to say how much has changed in the last …

Continue reading "How is automation impacting the dba role?"

In this blog post I’ll look at the performance of Percona XtraDB Cluster on AWS using different service instances, and recommend some best practices for maximizing performance.

You can use Percona XtraDB Cluster in AWS environments. We often get questions about how best to deploy it, and how to optimize both performance and spend when doing so. I decided to look into it with some benchmark testing.

For these benchmark tests, I used the following configuration:

• Region:
  • Availability zones: US East – 1, zones: b, c, d
  • Sysbench 1.0.8
  • ProxySQL 1.4.3
  • 10 tables, 40mln records – ~95GB dataset
  • Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.18
  • Amazon Linux AMI

We …

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents Databases in the Hosted Cloud on Wednesday, October 4, 2017, at 7:00 am PDT / 10:00 am EDT (UTC-7).

Register Now

Today you can use hosted MySQL/MariaDB/Percona Server for MySQL/PostgreSQL in several “cloud providers” as a database as a service (DBaaS). Learn the differences, the access methods and the level of control you have for the various public databases in the hosted cloud offerings:

• Amazon RDS including Aurora
• Google Cloud SQL
• Rackspace OpenStack DBaaS
• Oracle Cloud’s MySQL Service …

“To be competitive with non-open-source cloud deployment options, open source databases need to invest in “ease-of-use.” There is no tolerance for complexity in many development teams as we move to “ops-less” deployment models.” –Peter Zaitsev

I have interviewed Peter Zaitsev, Co-Founder and CEO of Percona.
In this interview, Peter talks about the Open Source Databases market; the Cloud; the scalability challenges at Facebook; compares MySQL, MariaDB, and MongoDB; and presents Percona’s contribution to the MySQL and MongoDB ecosystems.

RVZ

Q1. What are the main technical challenges in obtaining application scaling?

Peter Zaitsev: When it comes to scaling, there are different types. There is a Facebook/Google/Alibaba/Amazon scale: these …

Percona Live 2017 is done for Wednesday, but there was still time to get in one more talk before tonight’s Community Networking Reception – and the last one of the evening was about Amazon RDS.

Darin Briskman, Lead Developer Outreach & Technical Evangelist for Amazon, held two back-to-back sessions on Database management made simple – Amazon RDS. Amazon Relational Database Service (or Amazon RDS) is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Darin reviewed how Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, …