Working in an operations environment means that you get a lot of questions.  There’s the inevitable troubleshooting tasks that go along with being a DBA.  This is designed to be a quick reference post, much like my more in depth post in 2016 about timeouts. These typical error messages can create confusion and unneeded activities to diagnose.  To aid my own process of elimination and those of others, here are three error messages every DBA should know by heart.

SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Connection timed out

Plain and simple: this error means the client cannot connect to the server.

• The calling program is trying to connect to the wrong database server (one that it cannot reach).
• The database server is completely down (you’d get another error if the server and client actually made a connection). …

This post is a hands-on look at ZFS with MySQL.

In my previous post, I highlighted the similarities between MySQL and ZFS. Before going any further, I’d like you to be able to play and experiment with ZFS. This post shows you how to configure ZFS with MySQL in a minimalistic way on either Ubuntu 16.04 or Centos 7.

Installation

In order to be able to use ZFS, you need some available storage space. For storage – since the goal here is just to have a hands-on experience – we’ll use a simple file as a storage device. Although simplistic, I have now been using a similar setup on my laptop for nearly three years (just can’t get rid of it, it is too useful). For simplicity, I suggest you use a small Centos7 or Ubuntu 16.04 VM with one core, 8GB of disk and 1GB of RAM.

First, you need to install …

In this post we show how to use the mysql-server Docker image for local development. We first introduce a simple example app that starts up and tries to connect to a given db until successful. We then show how to start containers for multiple MySQL versions and use our example app to connect to them. […]

In this blog post, I’ll look at MySQL and Linux context switches and what is the normal number per second for a database environment.

You might have heard many times about the importance of looking at the number of context switches to indicate if MySQL is suffering from the internal contention issues. I often get the question of what is a “normal” or “acceptable” number, and at what point should you worry about the number of context switches per second?

First, let’s talk about what context switches are in Linux. This StackOverflow Thread provides a good discussion, with a lot of details, but basically it works like this:  

The process (or thread in MySQL’s case) is running its computations. Sooner or later, it has to do some blocking operation: disk IO, network IO, block waiting on a mutex …

Ok, so now we’re got our InnoDB Cluster a-clustering, MySQL Router a-routing, now we need some disaster to be a-disaster-recovering…

A foreword first.

If you’re looking to use Enterprise Backup to recover a single node and restore that node back into an existing InnoDB Cluster, LeFred takes you through that one nicely here.

Preparing for backup

On our single primary server, the one that allows write, which was ic2/10.0.0.12 in my case:

mysql -uroot -poracle << EOF 
SET sql_log_bin = OFF; 
 create user 'backup'@'%' identified by 'oracle';
 grant all on *.* to 'backup'@'%';
SET sql_log_bin = ON; 
EOF

Let’s create something to backup (if you haven’t already done so of course):

mysqlsh --uri …

Want to setup InnoDB Cluster and be prepared for a Disaster Recovery scenario? Get ready:

Here’s a way to set up InnoDB Cluster using the 3 environments, on Oracle Linux 7.2, 5.7.19 MySQL Commercial Server, MySQL Shell 8.0.3 DMR, MySQL Router. As this is the first blog post for a complete disaster recovery scenario of InnoDB Cluster, we’ll also be installing MySQL Enterprise Backup.

If you’re new to InnoDB Cluster then I’d highly recommend looking at the following to understand how it works and what Group Replication, Shell & Router are.:

• https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/mysql-innodb-cluster-production-deployment.html
• …

“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 …

The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

Fedora 26 is scheduled to arrive today, July 11, and we congratulate the highly productive Fedora community on another rev of many people’s favorite distro. We’re continuing our tradition of supporting new distro releases from day one, and Fedora 26 users will find the following MySQL products in the official MySQL yum repos: MySQL Server […]

Debian logo by Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (CC-BY-SA) MySQL and Debian 9 “Stretch” Debian 9 (“Stretch”) was released on June 17, and we congratulate the Debian community on another iteration of a central Linux distro. Now, the Debian release team some time ago decided not to ship MySQL as part of the distro, instead replacing it […]