As the old management adage goes, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” In the fast-paced world of IT, this more accurately translates to, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.”

When it comes to your database, a continuous monitoring system provides the foundation for progress: metrics. Without a monitoring system, it’s impossible to determine whether changes actually impact the system’s performance, availability, and functionality.

Think of it like a science experiment: You wouldn’t trust research that didn’t measure the results. So why would you settle for faulty database metrics? Read the full article here.

Object-relational mapping is common in most modern web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails. For the developer APIs, the ORM provides simplified interaction with the database and a productivity boost. However, the layer of abstraction the ORM provides can hide how the database is being queried. If you’re not paying attention, these generated queries can have a negative effect on your database’s health and performance.

Join Owen August 4th at 2 PM EST (6 PM GMT), as he discusses ways common Rails ORMs can abuse various databases and how VividCortex can be used to discover them. He will show the before and after effects on database performance, using VividCortex to measure results.

This webinar is useful for any developer or sysadmin working with Ruby On Rails. While we use our product to detect problems, it will be helpful even if you do not currently use VividCortex.

About the Presenter

Owen Zanzal is a developer …

I noticed that in the latest release of Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), the behavior of wsrep_RSU_method changed somewhat.  Prior to this release, the variable was GLOBAL only, meaning to use it you would:

mysql> set GLOBAL wsrep_RSU_method='RSU';
mysql> ALTER TABLE ...
mysql> set GLOBAL wsrep_RSU_method='TOI';

This had the (possibly negative) side-effect that ALL DDL’s issued on this node would be affected by the setting while in RSU mode.

So, in this latest release, this variable was made to also have a SESSION value, while retaining GLOBAL as well. This has a couple of side-effects that are common to MySQL variables that are both GLOBAL and SESSION:

• The SESSION copy is made from whatever the GLOBAL’s value is when a new connection (session) is …

In the MySQL team we are currently considering a proposal to deprecate a number of alternative syntax uses with the INSERT and REPLACE commands. To provide examples:

CREATE TABLE `city` (
  `ID` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `Name` char(35) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `CountryCode` char(3) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `District` char(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `Population` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  PRIMARY KEY (`ID`),
  KEY `CountryCode` (`CountryCode`),
  CONSTRAINT `city_ibfk_1` FOREIGN KEY (`CountryCode`) REFERENCES `Country` (`Code`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=4080 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

INSERT INTO city SET
 Name='NewCity', CountryCode='CAN',District='MyDistrict',Population=1234;

INSERT INTO city (Name,CountryCode,District,Population) VALUE
 ('NewCity2', 'CAN', 'MyDistrict', 1234);

INSERT city (Name,CountryCode,District,Population) VALUES
 ('NewCity3', 'CAN', 'MyDistrict', 1234);
 
REPLACE INTO city (Name,CountryCode,District,Population) VALUE …

Galera Cluster has the ability to add new nodes to the cluster by handling internally the transfer of the entire dataset to the new node. The same procedure, called State Snapshot Transfer (SST), applies to nodes that are rejoining the cluster after being down for a longer period of time.

A lot of operations happen during SST and there are various things that could go wrong. This article describes how to configure our server optimally for SST and how to debug any issues that arise.

The Basics

Let’s first consider all the items that play a role in the preparation and configuration of SST.

Selecting an SST Method

Galera Cluster supports several different methods for performing SST so, before adding a new node, it is worth examining the alternatives:

• rsync is the default method and requires the least amount of setup. Its disadvantage is that the donor node remains locked for all …

We are big fans of automation which is also one of the reasons why we started TwinDB. We want to remove the pain around manual redundant jobs and automate them so that you can focus on what is important for your business.

Why Chef?

Awesome Chef

Chef is a great example of how automation can be successfully applied to infrastructure such that your infrastructure becomes easily deployable, manageable, testable and well documented. Whenever, I talk about the benefits of using Chef, I greatly highlight how writing Chef cookbooks essentially documents your infrastructure. Isn’t it great to have a well documented infrastructure, that anyone can reference to? How many times have I not heard someone tell me how they have no idea how a particular service was deployed, or what was deployed on a particular machine? Many many times, …

With MySQL 5.7 there will be many improvements and changes. The most valuable ones are:

1. “General Tablespace” feature -> From now you can place tables to separate tablespaces. Prior, on our hands there were only “System TableSpace” and “InnoDB file per table” options.

Check for further reading: General Tablespaces Create statement: Create TableSpace

2. Resizing InnoDB Buffer Pool online -> for changing innodb_buffer_pool_size variable restart is required prior to MySQL 5.7, from now we can change buffer pool size without restart dynamically. Read Documentation -> …

This Log Buffer Edition cuts through the crowd and picks some of the outstanding blog posts from Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL.

Oracle:

• Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams keep producing valuable software in short cycles and ensure that the software can be reliably released at any time.
• Query existing HBase tables with SQL using Apache Phoenix.
• Even though WebLogic with Active GridlLink are Oracle’s suggested approach to deploy Java applications that use Oracle Real Applications Clusters (RAC), …

MariaDB 10.0.20 was recently released, and is available for download here:

https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/10.0.20/

This is the eleventh GA release of MariaDB 10.0, and 21st overall release of MariaDB 10.0.

There were no major functionality changes, but there was one security fix, 6 crashing bugs fixed, some general upstream fixes, and quite a few bug fixes, so let me cover the highlights:

• Security Fix: Client command line option –ssl-verify-server-cert (and MYSQL_OPT_SSL_VERIFY_SERVER_CERT option of the client API) when used together with –ssl will ensure that the established connection is SSL-encrypted and the MariaDB server has a valid certificate. This fixes CVE-2015-3152.
• Crashing …

This is the first of two articles on sampling queries effectively. The second part is here.

Sampling is hard. This is the title of a talk I gave at a meetup in Boston a few weeks back. But what’s so hard about sampling anyway?

To begin with, let’s clarify what I mean by sampling. It’s a bit ambiguous because sampling could apply to a few different things one does with time series data. In this context, I’ll be talking about capturing individual events from a large, diverse set of events (queries).

Here’s a picture of a simple stream of events over time.

Notice that they are not all the same–some of them are higher or lower than others. This is a simple illustration of some variability in the stream.

The way VividCortex generates query insight is by computing metrics about the …