In the wrong context, almost anything can be funny, and MySQL’s error codes are no exception. A few weeks ago, things got a little loopy at VividCortex headquarters as we discovered some definitions that could be taken more than one way.

How It Began

It started with ER_M_BIGGER_THAN_D, which doesn’t sound like an error at all. Anyone who knows alphabetical order knows that M is bigger than D! Of course, the error is really about an attempt to define a decimal or float column wrongly.

Next was ER_TOO_BIG_SCALE, about which I tweeted “MongoDB doesn’t have this error, as far as I know, but MySQL does.”

MongoDB doesn't have this error, as far as I know, but MySQL does.

ER_TOO_BIG_SCALE

…

Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On CentOS 7.0 This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On CentOS 7.0 This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

I just posted on the Server team's blog, an account on my recent only_full_group_by work. We have made significant improvements in 5.7.5, worth a look!

Wed, 2014-12-10 13:30mriddoch

One of the nice things about the "plug and play" approach of MaxScale is that people constantly find ways of using it that were not originally envisaged when we designed MaxScale. One such configuration that I have heard of from multiple sources is using monitoring outside of MaxScale itself. This post will discuss a little about how monitoring works and how it can be moved outside of MaxScale. In particular a simplified example will be presented which shows how to use the notification mechanism in Galera to control MaxScale's use of the nodes in a Galera cluster.

Monitoring Within MaxScale

Perhaps it is best to start with a little background as to what the function of the monitor plugin is within MaxScale, how they work and how the plugins communicate with the other components of MaxScale.

MaxScale monitors the servers for one reason only, so that it is able to feed the routing …

Here’s an account of recent work which has kept me busy and excited for a few months. For those unfamiliar with the only_full_group_by sql mode, let me provide some context. I’ll use the world database, which can be downloaded from this MySQL Documentation page. You can find details on how to install the database on the same page. We have a table of countries and a table of languages spoken in each country. It’s a 1-to-N relationship: a country can have many languages so CountryLanguage.CountryCode is a foreign key referencing Country.Code:

mysql> desc Country;
+----------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field          | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra | …

Today at the #ukoug_tech14 I had the chance to attend to the Christo Kutrovky's session @kutrovsky (Pythian) about "Measuring Performance in Oracle Solaris & Oracle Linux". This session aimed to present how to measure system utilization in the Linux and Oracle Solaris operating systems and how to use these information for tuning and capacity planning. During this session we had a very good introduction to a bunch of performance monitoring tools that can be categorized in four categories (non exhaustive list of tool):

1. CPU:

• top
• vmstat
• time
• mpstat

2. Memory - RAM

2.1 Global

• /proc/meminfo
• vmstat
• ipcs

Disclaimer: Do this at your own risk! It doesn’t apply if you’re using Pluggable authentication and certainly won’t be usable if/when MySQL system tables are stored on InnoDB

Recover your root password with care!

What is the situation?

The situation is the classic “need to recover MySQL root password” but you cannot restart MySQL (because it is the master production server, or any other reason), which makes the –skip-grant-tables solution as a no-no possibility.

 What can I do?

There is a workaround, which is the following:

•  Launch another instance of mysqld, a small one (without innodb).
•  Copy your user.[frm|MYD|MYI] files from the original datadir to the datadir of the new instance.
• Modify them and then copy …

Oracle DBAs have has the luxury of their V$ variables for a long time while we MySQL DBAs pretended we were not envious. With MySQL 5.6 and 5.7 we were gifted with the PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA tables. But there is such a wealth of information in those tables that it is intimidating to plunge in to them.  Thankfully Mark Leith has given us the SYS Schema. The SYS Schema is a collection of views, functions and procedures to help MySQL administrators get insight in to MySQL Database usage.

The first step is to get a copy of the SYS SCHEMA files.
git clone https://github.com/MarkLeith/mysql-sys


Next install the SYS Schema (here for MySQL 5.7)
mysql -u root -p < ./sys_57.sql

Now run MySQL and look at this …

I had an enjoyable time last night at Twitter with local MySQL DBAs and developers. We had an attendee who has no experience with SQL or programming at all. She is interested in organizing her collection of recipes and had heard a rumor that MySQL was a good tool to use for this task. She indicated that her desktop runs Windows 7. I think I’m going to encourage her to turn her concept in to a community project, as she is not the first person I’ve met who wants to organize recipes!

We were hosted by Rob at Twitter, who used to work with Lisa back before she retired. He’s a member of the site reliability team and keeps the fail whale from rearing its blubbery head.

Pizza was provided by my dear friend and long-time open source buddy Gerry Narvaja with the assistance of the folks in the kitchen at Zeek’s.

We discussed new techniques in the areas of load …