Mon, 2014-10-06 07:24martinbrampton

How can we find extra ways to test MaxScale? It‘s now working its way through a beta program, heading for general release. As part of the team responsible for its development, I’ve been looking for ways to find obscure bugs. Several approaches are involved, including unit tests and system tests. But another thing we wanted to try was to put a real life application, written by other people, in front of MaxScale.

What’s it all about?

To recap, the role of MaxScale is to present itself to clients as if it were a single MariaDB or MySQL database. In reality, it’s nothing of the kind. Instead it is an ingenious mechanism for talking to some kind of database group - maybe a cluster, maybe a master-slave group, maybe some more esoteric combination of multiple databases. MaxScale can adopt a variety of strategies to decide which of the back end databases will receive any particular …

Have you donwloaded our latest eBook, Configuring MySQL for Performance? It offers simple advice on configuring the most important settings to maximize your MySQL performance.

Below are a couple tidbits:

The Default Storage Engine

The default_storage_engine setting is the engine used for tables that don’t specify an engine explicitly. This used to be MyISAM, but it’s changed to InnoDB more recently. This is a good thing; it’s the engine we’ve suggested as default for most use cases for years. Just check to ensure this is set as you desire. If you don’t know what engine to use, the right answer is probably InnoDB.

The Query Cache

The query cache (variables whose names begin query_cache ) should generally be disabled, unless you’re quite familiar with MySQL and its inner workings and know that it’ll help on your workload. You can find a lot of discussion online about the potential impacts …

This session describes how MySQL empowers the games at King, particularly how the explosive
growth of Candy Crush Saga was handled and how the constant high load is served. It discusses what makes King’s applications scale, what problems the company has solved, what it is currently solving, and what it will be solving tomorrow. As the presentation describes King’s architecture, it highlights its strengths; weaknesses; major pain points; and, of course, greatest successes.

Download presentation here
http://www.slideshare.net/TedWennmark/mysqlking

MySQL 5.6.21 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.6, is GA), and is available for download here.

For this release, there was 1 “InnoDB Notes” and 1 “Functionality Added or Changed” bug fix (and 0 “Security Fix”), so not much there, but of course they should be noted:

1. InnoDB Note: The –skip-innodb option is now deprecated and its use results in a warning. It will be removed in a future MySQL release. This also applies to its synonyms (–innodb=OFF, –disable-innodb, and so forth).
2. Functionality Added: Internally, spatial data types such as Geometry are represented as BLOB values, so when invoked with the –hex-blob option, mysqldump now displays spatial values in hex. (Bug #43544, Bug …

This week I have been spending a little bit of time creating a module for Sysbench so that it can use libAttachSQL as a database driver. The reason for doing this is twofold:

1. Brian (my boss at HP's Advanced Technology Group) said now would be a good time to benchmark libAttachSQL
2. I really needed more than a few basic queries to shake out bugs in the library, and a benchmark is a good way to shove a few million through it

On the bug front, it did find a total of 5 bugs, a couple of them serious. Which is great, the more testing and bug finding the better. These have all been fixed in GitHub and will be part of the upcoming 0.5.0 release.

The Test Setup …

MS Access Migration

MS Access support was added to the Migration Wizard in MySQL Workbench 6.2, joining MS SQL Server, Sybase ASE, Sybase SQL Anywhere, PostgreSQL, SQLite and “Generic ODBC” as migration sources. You can read more about it in How-To: Guide to Database Migration from MS Access using MySQL Workbench.

Include Model Scripts in Forward Engineering and Synchronization

Workbench modeling has always supported attaching SQL script files to the model, usually for documentation/organization purposes. You can now include these attachments to the output script when performing forward engineering or synchronization.

Resume data copy …

Oracle Open World is in full bloom. Enthusiasts of Oracle and MySQL are flocking to extract as much knowledge, news, and fun as possible. SQL Server aficionados are not far behind too.

Oracle:

Frank Nimphius have announced REST support for ADF BC feature on OOW today. Probably this functionality will be available in the next JDeveloper 12c update release.

RMAN Enhancements New Privilege A new SYSBACKUP privilege is created in Oracle 12c,  it allows the grantee to perform BACKUP and RECOVERY operations with RMAN SQL in RMAN.

To continue with the objective of separating duties and the least privileges, …

HAProxy is frequently used as a load-balancer in front of a Galera cluster. While diagnosing an issue with HAProxy configuration, I realized that logging doesn’t work out of the box on CentOS 6.5. Here is a simple recipe to fix the issue.

If you look at the top of /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg, you will see something like:

global
    log         127.0.0.1 local2
[...]

This means that HAProxy will send its messages to rsyslog on 127.0.0.1. But by default, rsyslog doesn’t listen on any address, hence the issue.

Let’s edit /etc/rsyslog.conf and uncomment these lines:

$ModLoad imudp
$UDPServerRun 514

This will make rsyslog listen on UDP port 514 for all IP addresses. Optionally you can limit to 127.0.0.1 by adding:

$UDPServerAddress …

Generated Columns is a new feature available in the latest lab release. This work is based on a contribution by Andrey Zhakov. Thanks, Andrey! The Optimizer team modified it to follow the current MySQL design, and to lift a number of limitations.

The syntax is:

<type>   [ GENERATED ALWAYS ]   AS   ( <expression> )   [ VIRTUAL|STORED ]
[ UNIQUE [KEY] ]   [ [PRIMARY] KEY ]   [ NOT NULL ]   [ COMMENT <text> ]

There are two kinds of Generated Columns: virtual (default) and stored. Virtual means that the column will be calculated on the fly when a record is read from a table. Stored means that the column will be …

libAttachSQL Benchmarks With Sysbench

This week I have been spending a little bit of time creating a module for Sysbench so that it can use libAttachSQL as a database driver. The reason for doing this is twofold:

1. Brian (my boss at HP’s Advanced Technology Group) said now would be a good time to benchmark libAttachSQL
2. I really needed more than a few basic queries to shake out bugs in the library, and a benchmark is a good way to shove a few million through it

On the bug front, it did find a total of 5 bugs, a couple of them serious. Which is great, the more testing and bug finding the better. These have all been fixed in GitHub and will be part of the …