Mon, 2014-09-29 13:00mriddoch

The MaxScale team have been working hard fixing bugs and improving performance. On Friday we released a update of MaxScale, the pluggable proxy for MySQL and MariaDB, I wanted to write a little about a few of those changes. I will not mention every change, there are release notes that give the list of bugs fixed in this version, but rather highlight a couple of performance related changes and describe the rationale behind them. However before I start on the two items I wanted to discuss just a quick note to say that this version introduces cmake as the means to build MaxScale. The previous Makefiles are still available in this version, but will be withdrawn in future versions as we transition to cmake for build, installation and packaging.

Connection Starvation

In one of the test scenarios that I was running I was observing an issue that manifested itself as pauses in the …

MySQL is the database of choice for most OpenStack components (Ceilometer is a notable exception). If you start with a small deployment, it will probably run like a charm. But as soon as the dataset grows, you will suddenly face several challenges. We will write a series of blog posts explaining the issues you may hit and how to overcome them.

Where is MySQL used in OpenStack?

Have a look at the logical diagram of OpenStack below (click the image for a larger view).

The diagram is a bit outdated: Neutron appears as Quantum and newer components like Heat are not pictured. But it shows that a database has to be used to store metadata or runtime information. And although …

MySQL Connector/Python v2.0 goes GA with version 2.0.1 GA. It is available for download from the MySQL Developer Zone! The previous post about 2.0 described what changed and what was added, here’s an overview:

• Incompatibilities
  • Supported Python: 2.6 and 2.7 and 3.3 and 3.4
  • Raw Cursors Return bytearray Objects
  • LOAD LOCAL DATA INFILE On by Default
• New features
  • New Cursors return dictionaries and named tuples
  • Options Files Support Added
• Packaging and support files removed
…

We are very happy to introduce a new MySQL utility named 'mysqlbinlogmove', which is used to relocate binary log files. This utility is one of two new utilities included in MySQL Utilities release-1.6.0 Alpha. The other utility is 'mysqlgrants', which is used to display the privileges (grants) of database objects.

Note: I use "binary log" to refer to both "kinds" of binary log files (binlog and relay log files) in general, and use "binlog" to refer specifically to those that are not "relay log" files.

The mysqlbinlogmove utility allows you to move binary log files to a new location taking care of correctly updating the respective index file for you. This utility can be very useful if you want to change the location to store the binlog file and you want to move all of the binary log files. It is also handy to archive older binary log files to a new location thereby saving disk space in the server's partition.
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We are very happy to introduce a new MySQL utility named “mysqlbinlogmove“, which is used to relocate binary log files. This utility is one of two new utilities included in MySQL Utilities release-1.6.0 Alpha. The other utility is “mysqlgrants“, which is used to display the privileges (grants) of database objects.

Note: I use “binary log” to refer to both “kinds” of binary log files (binlog and relay log files) in general, and use “binlog” to refer specifically to those that are not “relay log” files.

The mysqlbinlogmove utility allows you to move binary log files to a new location taking care of correctly updating the respective index file for you. This utility can be very useful if you want to change the location to store the binlog file and you want to move all of the binary log files. It is also handy to archive older binary log files to a new location thereby saving disk …

We are happy to announce mysqlgrants, a new utility that allows users to display the privileges of grantees over database objects. Together with mysqlbinlogmove, these are the new utilities included in MySQL Utilities release-1.6.0 Alpha.

Mysqlgrants allows you to know which users have access to a specific object or list of objects. Furthermore, it can also show the list of privileges that each user has over said object(s). In short, mysqlgrants simplifies the task of monitoring grants in MySQL helping you ensure users do not have more permissions than necessary, thus keeping data more secure.

Main Features

Below is a summary of the main features of the mysqlgrants utility:

• Helps DBAs to see which users have what level of access for each object listed.
• Supports several types of reporting: list just the grantees, the grantees and their respective grants or the …

Cloud service provider Backblaze has updated its earlier study of hard drive failure rates (Nov 2013) in its own infrastructure – from 27,000 to more than 34,000 drives, and the new report (Sep 2014) is quite informative. Hitachi comes out pretty high, Western Digital has produced some good drives, but Seagate tends to come out worst. Each brand does have good and not-so-good models so there’s no single right answer, and for any new model you’ll always be dealing with an unknown factor.

Backblaze also found that consumer drives actually perform well compared to enterprise grade drives, and once price is taking into account the enterprise drives just …

I am speaking at two sessions at Oracle Open World this week; one tutorial and one hands-on-lab:

• How to Analyze and Tune MySQL Queries for Better Performance
  Monday, Sep 29, 10:15 AM
• MySQL EXPLAIN in Practice 
  Wednesday, Oct 1, 10:15 AM

I can also recommend the other sessions by members of the MySQL Optimizer Team:

• Manyi Lu: MySQL 5.7: What’s New in the Parser and the Optimizer?
  Wednesday, Oct 1, 11:30 AM …

We will be attending and participating in the MySQL Central at Oracle Open World September 30 - October 2. We will be demoing our product at booth 2433.

Baron Schwartz will also be speaking on VividCortex’s MySQL infrastructure. Details are below:

Session ID: CON5105 Session Title: Inside VividCortex’s MySQL Architecture Venue / Room: Moscone South - 262 Date and Time: 10/2/14, 9:30 - 10:15 Summary: VividCortex ingests a lot of data at high velocity and stores it in a cloud-hosted back end based primarily on MySQL. Baron Schwartz will explain how VividCortex uses MySQL and why it’s been the best choice thus far.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

The MySQL Utilities Team is pleased to announce the general availability (GA) release of MySQL Utilities. This release includes a number of improvements for useabilty, stability, and a few enhancements. A complete list of all improvements can be found in our release_notes.
New Enhancements! This release represents a stable release of the product. Along with several defect patches, we also include the following enhancements.

• The mysqlserverclone utility now checks diskspace as a prerequisite to cloning the server.
• The --force option was removed from the mysqlfailover utility to remove confusion on its purpose.
• A warning is issued if the mysqld --skip-innodb option is used because this option is ignored in MySQL 5.7 and later.
• Utilities can correctly parse and display the PROXY …