Tue, 2015-01-13 10:59vilho_raatikka_l

Applications are often built on top of single MySQL-compliant database instance but often there is a need for more performance and/or availability than what one database instance can provide. Adding slaves or replacing standalone database server with full-fledged MySQL-compliant cluster often requires changes to the application.

MaxScale and its Read Write Split router (rwsplit, for short) attempts to hide the complexity brought by multiple backend servers and to minimize the need for application changes by taking care of authentication, managing connections and providing session management on behalf of the client.

Read Write Split router is a plug-in module, which can be used with MaxScale to receive, examine and forward queries sent by clients. Routing decision is based on query type and some other criteria, such as transaction state, and replication lag. For rwsplit, every cluster …

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 …

There will be a MySQL & Friends Devroom at the FOSDEM 2015 this year.And surprisingly my talk - not sure you can call 15 min a talk  - had been accepted. (There are other accepted talks of course.) 
It will be a dense talk about Docker/MySQL/Galera :)
We are (at least me) are going to have fun \o/ Erkan
I hope there will be an official announcement too.  

Fri, 2015-01-09 13:19maria-luisaraviol

MariaDB MaxScale is now RC and together with all the MariaDB team that has been involved in the project we need to thank all the companies that agreed to become part of the MaxScale Beta Test Plan. This major step in the MaxScale life (read more here) had an important impact on the MaxScale QA process.

We have asked some companies to help us in testing MaxScale in “real” environments with different custom settings, different configurations and with traffic load as close to reality as possible.

Colt Engine, an Italian hosting company based in Turin (Italy) applied immediately. They have been a great fan of MariaDB MaxScale and have been enthusiastic early testers of MaxScale since early 2014 when it still was Alpha. Actually they have suggested some of the MaxScale filter plugins.

I started …

Covering Indexes not being chosen by optimizer I noticed this problem about a year ago when writing this blogpost. In short problem is when adding a covering index and keeping old non-covering index the optimizer opted to use old non-covering index. Only solution was to FORCE optimizer to use covering index which meant you needed to modify your DML or remove old index.
Using the same test setup as in my old blogpost but when you add new covering index do not drop the old index.
So, instead of running: mysql> ALTER TABLE big DROP INDEX CountryCode;
mysql> ALTER TABLE big ADD INDEX conPop (CountryCode, Population);
We run only statement for adding new covering index and do not remove old index: …

Join 29,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Oh RDS, you offer such promise, but damn it if the devil isn’t always buried in the details. Diving into a recent project, I’ve been looking at upgrading RDS MySQL. Major MySQL upgrades can be a bit messy. Since the entire engine is rebuilt, queries […]

"Should vegetarians open steakhouse restaurants?"

Though someone will probably give me several examples of why they should, I'll argue that they absolutely should not. How can someone who doesn't eat steak convince others to eat at their "steak-only" restaurant?

But this is something a "professional technology benchmarker" (PTB) struggles with on a regular basis. Hello, I'm Tim Callaghan, and I'm a PTB.
professional technology benchmarker, or PTB (noun) : One who compares two technologies as part of their job. One of these technologies is usually the product of the PTB's employer, the other is almost always not. In a past experience I was tasked with comparing the performance of a fully in-memory database with Oracle and MySQL on a "TPC-C like" workload. At the time I was an Oracle expert and working for the in-memory database company, but had never started a single MySQL server in my life. At …

VividCortex now supports per-user metrics in Top Queries, so you can monitor MySQL database user activity in detail. By changing the Rank menu from Queries to Users you can now see a breakdown of user activity in the familiar format, all with 1 second resolution. Here “user” means the database user account that the application uses to access the database.

Computed columns also work as usual so you can quickly figure out which users consume more resources such as CPU or IO in addition to the standard metrics (count, time, latency, error rate, etc). Additional information such as per-host user activity and scatterplots of additional data can be found after clicking to drill into the query.

We detect the user by sniffing from the TCP traffic, as usual. There are two places we can capture it: during connection, or from a COM_CHANGE_USER packet. Sometimes we can’t detect a user for a connection in which case we show …

This is yet another story of Django web-framework with time zone support and pain dealing with python datetimes and MySQL on the backend. In other words, offset-naive vs offset-aware datetimes.

Shortly, more about the problem. After reading the official documentation about the time zones, it makes clear that in order to reflect python datetime in the necessary time zone you need to make it tz-aware first and than show in that time zone.

Here is the first issue: tz-aware in what time zone? MySQL stores timestamps in UTC and converts for storage/retrieval from/to the current time zone. By default, the current time zone is the server’s time, can be changed on MySQL globally, per connection etc. So it becomes not obvious what was tz of the value initially before stored in UTC. If you …

Twitter is not my favorite social media site. Using twitter is like driving downtown, screaming what you want to say out the window, and hoping someone hears you. There might be tens of thousands of people downtown, but your message will only be heard by a few. Your best bet is to repeat your message as often as possible.

However, twitter is free and if you want to reach as many people (theoretically) as possible, you might as well use it. But sending tweets on a scheduled basis can be a pain. There are client programs available which allow you to schedule your tweets (Hootsuite is one I have used in the past). You can load your tweets in the morning, and have the application tweet for you all day long. But you still have to load the application with your tweets – one by one.

A friend of mine asked me if there was a way to send the same 200 tweets over and over again, spaced out every 20 minutes or so. He has a consulting …