The Brainiac Corner is a format where we talk with some of the smartest minds in the system, database, devops, and IT world. If you have opinions on pirates, or anything else related, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Today, we interview Charity Majors, the production engineering manager for Parse at Facebook. Prior to the acquisition, she built Parse’s infrastructure. Shes hates/loves/hates databases and loves whiskey.

How did you get from stork to brainiac (i.e. what do you do today and how did you get there)?

I manage a team of production engineers working on Parse at Facebook. We are responsible for the performance, reliability, scalability, and database operations for 500,000+ mobile apps.

I started out doing classical piano performance, but I fell in love with computers in college. Since then I’ve worked all …

Sometimes data sets are so large, a mysqldump to load a slave is just not practical.  With some of the systems we have administrated, we have had data so large it would have taken days to load the slave when it became out of sync with the master.  When this happens, we usually rely upon Percona’s XTRABackup utility which allows us to make a hot/online backup of the master to use for loading the slave.

In the old days we had to rely upon a third-party tool called ibbackup, or InnoDB Hot Backup utility to do this task. In many ways XTRABackup is a replacement for this tool and has in fact surpassed the ibbackup utility in features and function.

The most efficient way we have found to transfer that data to the slave is the use of the netcat utility.

We also use the screen command since we expect this could take quite some time and don’t want to take the chance that a network connection issue, or a dropped VPN, …

Sometimes you encounter a server with multiple tables of a particular storage engine which you need to convert to another storage engine.  For us, this often happens when we find systems running MyISAM and we want to get these over to InnoDB.

There are a number of reasons to consider converting a table to another storage engine, such as performance, gaining additional features such as Foreign Keys, and so on.  You should, however, stop to consider that not all storage engines are created the same and do not offer the same features.

If there are hundreds of tables, the process can be very time consuming so we put together a simple bash script to automate this process.

#!/bin/sh

MY_USER="root"
MY_PASSWORD="mypassword"
MY_HOST="127.0.0.1"
MY_PORT=3306
NEW_ENGINE="InnoDB"

TABLES=`mysql -u$MY_USER -p$MY_PASSWORD -h$MY_HOST -P$MY_PORT -e"SELECT CONCAT(TABLE_SCHEMA,'.',TABLE_NAME) AS 'TABLE' FROM …

Hi Keith, Kindly please share the demo kit application. It will helps us in testing and validation of our MySQL CGE edition setup.

Section I: Fractal Tree and Optimization Overview
Tokutek’s Fractal Tree® technology provides fast performance by injecting small messages into buffers inside the Fractal Tree index. This allows writes to be batched, thus eliminating I/O that is required in traditional B-tree indexes for every operation. Additional background information on how Fractal Trees operate can be found in Zardosht Kasheff’s blog entitled, TokuMX Fractal Tree Indexes, What Are They? Don’t be thrown off by the title, Fractal Tree Indexes access data in the same way for TokuDB as they do for TokuMX.

For tables whose workload pattern is a high number of sequential deletes, some operational maintenance is required to ensure consistently fast performance.  If this is not done, delete messages and garbage can exist in the Fractal …

Wed, 2015-02-11 14:14geoff_montee_g

I have been thinking about how I could streamline my deployment and configuration of MariaDB with salt for a while now. When I decided to give it a shot, I didn't find any formulas that I liked, so I decided to start writing my own. Currently, my salt formula can deploy MariaDB 5.5, MariaDB Galera Cluster 5.5, MariaDB 10.0, or MariaDB Galera Cluster 10.0 to a CentOS 6 or 7 server.

How do I use this formula?

I'll go through the basic setup process of a SaltStack master and minion on CentOS 7. If you're curious to know more about salt, check out the documentation.

Set up a salt master

To set up a salt master, first execute the following commands:

sudo yum …

Taxonomy upgrade extras:  myenv operation MySQL Operations multi instance consolidation testing upgrade

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 1.1.4 of its popular MySQL, Galera Cluster, MariaDB and Percona Server multi-instance environment MyEnv.

The new MyEnv can be downloaded …

Global data access can greatly expand the reach of your business. Continuent's multi-site multi-master (MSMM) solutions enable applications to accept write traffic in multiple locations across on-premises and vCloud Air. This includes the following important real-world use cases:

Improve performance for globally distributed users registering hardware devices by permitting updates on the

Global Transaction IDs (GTIDs) are one of my favorite features of MySQL 5.6. The main limitation is that you must stop all the servers at the same time to allow GTID-replication. Not everyone can afford to take a downtime so this requirement has been a showstopper for many people. Starting with Percona Server 5.6.22-72.0 enabling GTID replication can be done without almost no downtime. Let’s see how to do it.

Implementation of the Facebook patch

Finding a solution to migrate to GTIDs with no downtime is not a new idea, and several companies have already developed their own patch. The 2 best known implementations are the one from Facebook and the one from …

We often get questions about how we measure queries inside MySQL (and now PostgreSQL too). Many of these questions reveal assumptions about the metrics we provide and our methods for obtaining them. I thought it would be both interesting and helpful to clarify how we really do this. This article may get a bit dense, but by the end you will have a better sense of our database management platform’s unique approach.

VividCortex is a complex system that captures and analyzes several different types of data. It’s not solely one thing or another. The magic comes from the intersection of the various useful kinds of data:

• Unlike database monitoring tools that simply draw graphs of status counters, VividCortex measures queries the server executes.
• Unlike log analysis tools that just aggregate queries along …