Don't miss these MySQL clustering and replication keynotes and sessions next week:

Keynote: What has the cloud done lately for my data? (Robert Hodges, VMware)  Moving Workloads Effectively to Hybrid Cloud Deployments (MC Brown, VMware)  Tutorial: Advanced MySQL replication features roundup (Giuseppe Maxia, VMware) Pivot tables: Analytics in pure SQL (Giuseppe Maxia, VMware) The perils of

MySQL QA Episode #1: Bash/GNU Tools & Linux Upskill & Scripting Fun

This episode consists of 13 parts, and an introduction. See videos below

In HD quality (set your player to 720p!)

Introduction

Part 1: echo, ls, cp, rm, vi, cat, df, du, tee, cd, clear, uname, date, time, cat, mkdir

Part 2: find, wc, sort, shuf, tr, mkdir, man, more

Part 3: Redirection, tee, stdout, stderr, /dev/null, cat

Part 4: Vars, ‘ vs “, $0, $$, $!, screen, chmod, chown, export, set, whoami, sleep, kill, sh, grep, sudo, su, pwd

Part 5: grep, regex (regular expressions), tr

Part 6: sed, regex (regular expressions)

Part 7: awk

Part 8: xargs

Part 9: subshells, …

Welcome to the MySQL QA Training Series!

If you have not read our introductory blog post on pquery yet, I’d recommend reading that one first to get a bit of background. The community is enthuastic about pquery, and today I am happy to announce a full training series on pquery and more. Whether you are a Linux or MySQL newbie or a seasoned QA engineer, there is something here for you. From Bash scripting (see episode 1 below), to every aspect of the new pquery framework, it is my hope that you enjoy this series. If you do, please leave us a comment

Database quality assurance is not as straightforward as it may seem. It’s not a matter of point-and-click, but rather of many intertwined tools and scripts. Beyond that, due to the complexity of the underlying product, it’s about having an overall plan or …

MySQL meets NoSQL with JSON UDF

I recently got back from FOSDEM, in Brussels, Belgium. While I was there I got to see a great talk by Sveta Smirnova, about her MySQL 5.7 Labs release JSON UDF functions. It is important to note that while the UDF come in a 5.7 release it is absolutely possible to compile and use the UDF with earlier versions of MySQL because the UDF interface has not changed for a long time. However, the UDF should still be considered alpha/preview level of quality and should not be used in production yet! For this example I am using Percona Server 5.6 with the UDF.

That being said, the proof-of-concept that I’m about to present here uses only one JSON function (JSON_EXTRACT) and it has worked well enough in my testing to present my idea here. The JSON functions will probably be GA sometime soon anyway, and this is a useful test of the JSON_EXTRACT function. …

For months when speaking with customers I have been positioning Percona Cloud Tools (PCT) as a valuable tool for the DBA/Developer/SysAdmin but only recently have I truly been able to harness the data and make a technical recommendation to a customer that I feel would have been very difficult to accomplish otherwise.

Let me provide some background: I was tasked with performing a Performance Audit for one of our customers (Performance Audits are extremely popular as they allow you to have a MySQL Expert confirm or reveal challenges within your MySQL environment and make your database run faster!) and as part of our …

MySQL 5.6 has an extensive list of new features and changes, so upgrading from a previous version can be risky if not tested extensively. For this reason, we recommend our users to read and understand the changes before doing the upgrade. If you are on older MySQL versions, it is probably time to think about upgrading. MySQL 5.6 was released in February 2013, that’s almost two years ago!

A major upgrade, e.g., from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6 or MariaDB 5.5 to 10, requires the former MySQL/MariaDB server related packages to be uninstalled. In Galera Cluster, there are two ways to upgrade; either by performing offline upgrade (safer, simpler, requires service downtime) or online upgrade (more complex, no downtime). 

In this blog post, we are going to show you how to perform an offline upgrade on Galera-based …

Sometimes it is desired to use particular software versions in production, and not necessary the latest ones. There may be several reasons for that, where I think the most common is when a new version should spend some time in testing or a staging environment before getting to production. In theory each new version is supposed to be better as usually it contains a handful of bug fixes and even new or improved functionality. However there is also a risk of some regression or a new bug introduction as a side effect of code changes.

Quite often DBAs want the same MySQL version to be installed on all database instances, regardless of what actually is the latest version available in the software provider’s repository. There are several ways to achieve this:
* download specific version packages manually and then install them,
* have custom local repository mirror where you decide when and which version gets there, and just update …

Check Out Our Latest Technical Resources for MySQL, MariaDB & MongoDB Clusters

Like every month this year, we have created new content and tools for you; here is a summary of what we’ve published this December. Please do check it out and let us know if you have any comments or feedback.

And thank you for following us in the past 12 months and for your fidelity; we look forward to “seeing” you next year as well and wish you a great start to 2015!

New Live Technical Webinars

Infrastructure automation isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either, says Riaan Nolan. Riaan has been in operations for the past decade, and has built over a dozen eCommerce …

TokuDB offers high throughput for write intensive applications, and the throughput scales with the number of concurrent clients.  However, when the binary log is turned on, TokuDB 7.5.2 throughput suffers.  The throughput scaling problem is caused by a poor interaction between the binary log group commit algorithm in MySQL 5.6 and the way TokuDB commits transactions.   TokuDB 7.5.4 for Percona Server 5.6 fixes this problem, and the result is roughly an order of magnitude increase in SysBench throughput for in memory workloads.

MySQL uses two phase commit protocol to synchronize the MySQL binary log with the recovery logs of the storage engines when a transaction commits.  Since fsync’s are used to ensure the durability of the data in the various logs, and fsync’s can be very slow, the fsync can easily become a bottleneck.  A …

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 …