MySQL's support of the BINARY and VARBINARY data type is good, and the BINARY and VARBINARY data types are good things. And now the details. What applies here for MySQL applies for MariaDB as well.

Who supports VARBINARY

There's an SQL:2008 standard optional feature T021 "BINARY and VARBINARY data types". Our book has a bigger description, but here is one that is more up to date:

Call for papers for Percona Live London 2014 is open. For the fourth consecutive year, PLUK is going to be one of the best community event in Europe.
I have the honour of being conference committee chairman and the hard task to reviewing the talks with my colleagues of the committee.

First, let me introduce the committee members:

• Art van Scheppingen (Spil Games)
• Nicolai Plum (Booking.com)
• Luis Motta Campos (Ebay Classifieds Group)
• Colin Charles (MariaDB)
• David Busby (Percona)
• Morgan Tocker (Oracle)
• Cédric PEINTRE (Dailymotion)

Amazing, isn’t it?! I think we couldn’t have a better committee for a community event.
I’m very glad to take part in the adventure with you guys!

And if you wonder what the committee does, …

Three useful little tidbits for using Ansible that I’ve come across.

1. How to use with_items on lists of multiple types

With a little jinja-fu you can iterate a list of strings and dicts to template the action in more elaborate ways than the typical use.

I was configuring the installation of some Python packages and wanted to fix the version of Django, but not the version of MySQL-python, since any updates to it are likely to be for security/compatability. Typically, with_items would be used to iterate over a list with dicts, like {name: package1, version: something}, but it’s tiresome to write when you often don’t care about one of the keys. Also, providing version="" won’t work with the pip module, since it would get converted to pip install package==, which pip doesn’t interpet as ‘latest’, so there would already …

There is a decent chance that I can guess one thing you are not monitoring on your server. And it is something that can stop insertions to a table. Guess what it is yet? 

The majority of tables in a database typically use what is called an "auto_increment" column. This means that when you insert a row into a table a column will be automatically populated with a number that is a fixed increment from the previously incremented column. The amount of increment can be configured by the auto_increment_increment variable. The problem is that these auto_increment columns have maximum values that they may hold. Once a auto_increment column reaches this maximum value it won't insert any more until the situation is resolved.

A good DBA is planning ahead -- averting problems before they ever happen. And this can be done here. Information about the auto_increment columns for a table are stored in …

IntroductionThis is an introduction to MariaDB Replication and to why we need a binlogs server and what this is. The first part is an introduction to replication basics, and if you know this already, then you want want to skip past the first section or two.
MariaDB ReplicationMySQL and MariaDB has a simple but very effective replication system built into it. The replication system is asynchronous and is based on a pull, instead of a push, system. What this means in short is that the Master keeps track of the DML operations and other things that might change the state of the master database and this is stored in what is called the binlog. The slave on the other hand is responsible for getting the relevant information from the master to keep up to speed. The binlogs consist of a number of files that the master generates, and the traditional way of dealing with slaves is to point them to the master, specifying a starting point in the binlogs …

This is the fourth post in our MySQL Fabric series. In case you’re joining us now, we started with an introductory post, and then discussed High Availability (HA) using MySQL Fabric here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). Today we will talk about how MySQL Fabric can help you scale out MySQL databases with sharding.

Introduction

At the time of writing, MySQL Fabric includes support for range- and hash-based sharding. As with HA, the functionality is split between client, through a MySQL Fabric-aware connector; and server, through the mysqlfabric utility and …

The server weighting feature of MaxScale may initially be seen as a way to influence load balancing for unequal servers, but it can also be useful for other reasons. Here we look at how we can use it to segregate different workloads within a cluster of MySQL or MariaDB servers.ConceptThe concept is based around a scenario in which you might have a number of applications that share the same database, but that have different workload profiles on that data. For example an online order processing system, with a fulfilment application and a reporting application. Each of these has different demands it places on the database and each has different priorities within the business. It is probably more important for a business to accept orders and fulfil them than to have up-to-the-minute reporting if failures start to occur within the infrastructure.The ImplementationThere are a few things to understand about MaxScale which make the implementation here …

Users seeking high availability, DR and zero downtime maintenance operation for business-critical MySQL applications face confusing choices. Is multi-master or master/slave clustering better?  What about synchronous versus asynchronous replication? Using a plain vanilla, stock MySQL or a modified version of it? Which of these choices are right for data-driven businesses that depend on fast,

MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.3.18 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site. This is a maintenance release that updates various third party components. You can find more information on the contents of this release in the change log.

You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support. Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then choose the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" side tab in the "Patch Search" portlet.

Important: MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 3.0 offers many significant improvements over MEM 2.3. If you have not already analyzed upgrading any remaining 2.3 installations to MEM 3.0, we highly recommend you do so. More information on MEM 3.0 is available here:

• …

I'm really excited about Fabric which was recently announced. Everything it does has been a variety of scripts for  me or manual tasks, but before I can integrate Fabric into my system I must know more about it. When dealing with live-data and moving servers around I still do things manually just because it makes me feel better to know that if data is lost, I was the cause for doing something dumb. Basically I need to know everything about Fabric including line by line execution until I will deploy it.


Here are my steps for switching and replacing a Shard Slave.
Imagine having a setup in the following Config.
Shard Server  10.0.30.123 - this is the master endpoint

The Global Shard which holds Friend Info to join against is 
10.0.1.1
10.0.30.123 --- replicates from …