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 …

Following on from my earlier proposal to change Replication + InnoDB settings, in the MySQL team, we are proposing to make the following additional changes to defaults in MySQL 5.7:

Fri, 2015-01-23 15:14markusmakela

MaxScale’s filter system is very flexible and enables a new way of interacting with queries. The upcoming firewall filter shows just one of the many ways that you can control and manage the flow of queries through MaxScale.

The firewall filter is meant to offer finer and more varied control over queries and their execution. The main idea of the filter is to work as a base to build and improve upon and to show just how that can be done with MaxScale.

The filter provides a variety of ways to control which kinds of queries get executed. The simplest ones block queries that happen during a certain time range or do a certain operation. The more complex ones can match queries using a regular expression, check for the existence of a WHERE clause in the query or deny the query on the basis of the current session’s query speed. These rules can be applied to specific users or network ranges or …

We create applications in an age of simple, powerful, flexible databases that do magic for us. There’s a large variety of modern databases that supply just what’s needed for lots of use cases, so we can pick the right tool for the job. We’ve never had it better, right? So why is “it’s the database again” still a sufficient explanation for a lot of outages and performance problems?

The reality is that as we’ve made huge strides in data management, we’ve both simplified and complicated our lives. One important way this has unfolded is precisely because of the diversity of choice we have. The phrase “choose the right tool for the job” is another way of saying “introduce diversity and complexity into the persistence tier.”

The World Has Changed

If you draw your application’s high-level architecture diagram on the whiteboard, what does it look like? Chances are you’ll draw some variation on a …

Welcome to blog #2 in a series about the benefits of the Fractal Tree. In this post, I’ll be explaining Big Data, why it poses such a problem and how Tokutek can help. Given the fact that I am a lifelong fan of both Hip-hop and Big Data, the title was a no-brainer and, given the artist, a bit of a pun.

 I am as tired as you of hearing the term “Big Data.” It’s so overused, that it ceases to have specific meaning anymore. You see, data hardly ever starts as “big” or a “problem.” Rather, it starts small and easily manageable, but gradually grows to some unimaginable size and becomes a beast in need of slaying, like the irradiated ant from a sci-fi film, growing to the size of a cruise ship. The nature of tackling such a tough problem means that the initial understanding of the factors involved is, oftentimes, incomplete at best; Catch-22 exemplified. During the course of problem it is …

Taxonomy upgrade extras:  Backup Restore Recovery fromdual_brman mysql_bman

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 1.2.1 of the popular Backup Manager for MySQL and MariaDB (fromdual_bman).

You can download the FromDual Backup Manager from here.

In the inconceivable case that you find a bug in the Backup Manager please report it to our …

Long running transactions can be problematic for OLTP workloads, particularly where we would expect most to be completed in less than a second. In some cases a transaction staying open just a few seconds can cause behaviour that is entirely unexpected, with the developers at a loss as to why a transaction remained open. There are a number of ways to find long running transactions, luckily versions of MySQL from 5.6 onwards provide some very insightful instrumentation.

Here we will use the information_schema coupled with the …

Oracle have just made availble the Release Candidate for MySQL Cluster 7.4 (MySQL Cluster 7.4.3) – it can be downloaded from the development release tab here. Note that this is not a GA release and so we wouldn’t recommend using it in production.

The delta between this RC and the 7.4.2 DMR can be viewed in the MySQL Cluster 7.4.3 Release Notes

There are three main focus areas for this RC and the purpose of this post is to briefly introduce them:

• Active-Active (Multi-Master) Replication
• Performance
• Operational improvements (speeding up of restarts; enhanced memory …

I was surprised by the recent announcement that MySQL are going to start to conceal the hidden function calls in their C connector. Surprised because although this is great news I had expected them to do this years ago. Working for HP's Advanced Technology Group I realise I take such things for granted. For this blog post I'm going to talk about why it is important and how to do it.

So, when you create a dynamic library in C the default thing that happens is every function call in that library effectively becomes a potential API call. Whether you document every single function or not to make it official API is up to you but I suspect in 99.99% of cases there are private functions you don't want users to mess with. Additionally holding the symbol information for every function so that you can link your application to it takes a …

Wed, 2015-01-21 18:27guillaumelefranc

If you are a DBA or system administrator, you should already be familiar with Percona Xtrabackup, the free hot backup tool for MariaDB and MySQL, and you probably use it to take onsite backups of your production databases.

But what if the backup server is inaccessible because of an outage, or the data has been corrupted? Offsite backups should also be part of a complete disaster recovery strategy.

Amazon Web Services is one of the most popular cloud services providers, and they developed Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) initially to backup their own Oracle databases. S3 is now used by many companies to store objects such as website statics, but it’s still a very popular solution for storing online backups: it’s cheap, reliable and easy to setup.

In this article we’ll see how to store securely our MariaDB+Xtrabackup backups in the cloud, using encryption and …