Recently, one of our support customers faced this: “[ERROR] mysqld: Sort aborted: Server shutdown in progress.” At first it would appear this occurred because of a mysql restart (i.e. the MySQL server restarted and the query got killed during the stopping of mysql). However, while debugging this problem I found no evidence of a MySQL server restart – which proves that what’s “apparent” is not always the case, so this error message was a bit misleading. Check this bug report for further details http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=18256 (it was reported back in 2006).

I found that there are two possible reasons for this error: Either the MySQL server restarts during execution of the query, or the query got killed forcefully during execution which utilizes the …

Not too long ago I attended a talk about a database called Datomic. My overall impressions of Datomic were pretty negative, but this blog post isn’t about that. This is about one of the things the speaker referenced a lot: immutability and its benefits. I hope to illustrate, if only sketchily, why a lot of sophisticated databases are actually leaps and bounds beyond the simplistic design of such immutable databases. This is in direct contradiction to what proponents of Datomic-like systems would have you believe; they’d tell you that their immutable database implementations are advanced. Reality is not so clear-cut.

Datomic and Immutability

The Datomic-in-a-nutshell is that it (apparently) uses an append-only B-tree to record data, and never updates any data after it’s written. I say “apparently” because the speaker didn’t know what an append-only B-tree was, but his detailed description matched AOBTs …

MySQL... We've blogged about MySQL before. Many times. We've shown bad ideas implemented in MySQL here: MySQL Bad Idea #384MySQL Bad Idea #573 But this beats everything. Check out this Stack Overflow question. It reads: "Why Oracle does not support 'group by 1,2,3'?". At first, I thought this user might have been confused because SQL … Continue reading MySQL Bad Idea #666 →

Not too long ago I attended a talk about a database called Datomic. My overall impressions of Datomic were pretty negative, but this blog post isn’t about that. This is about one of the things the speaker referenced a lot: immutability and its benefits. I hope to illustrate, if only sketchily, why a lot of sophisticated databases are actually leaps and bounds beyond the simplistic design of such immutable databases. This is in direct contradiction to what proponents of Datomic-like systems would have you believe; they’d tell you that their immutable database implementations are advanced. Reality is not so clear-cut.

Datomic and Immutability

The Datomic-in-a-nutshell is that it (apparently) uses an append-only B-tree to record data, and never updates any data after it’s written. I say “apparently” because the speaker didn’t know what an append-only B-tree was, but his detailed description matched AOBTs …

The MariaDB project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB 10.0.7. This is a Beta release. See the Release Notes and Changelog for detailed information on this release and the What is MariaDB 10.0? page in the MariaDB Knowledge Base for general information about the MariaDB 10.0 series.

Download MariaDB 10.0.7

Release Notes Changelog …

A few things to note recently, amongst MariaDB in distributions. 

1. Ubuntu keeps MySQL 5.5 despite MariaDB’s success. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but remember the key takeaway here is MySQL 5.5 & the fact that MariaDB wasn’t even in Debian yet when the decision was made.
2. MariaDB is now inside of Debian/sid – check out the packages.
3. RHEL 7 comes with MariaDB 5.5 as a default; this is a good thing.

Now, from a distribution standpoint, we’re looking at starting to ship 10.0 as …

Your MySQL server is overloaded. You see hundreds of running queries in the SHOW PROCESSLIST taking many seconds to run, or can’t connect at all because all connections slots are busy. If you have worked with MySQL long enough you surely have seen it, probably more than once. This is what I would call “MySQL server overload” – having more work than the server can possibly handle. At this point I see people often jumping to the conclusion that something went wrong with MySQL and focus all their effort on this belief. This is also often how we see questions framed when they are filed with our Support or to Emergency Consulting.

In fact there are two very distinct causes for such a situation – and to find the resolution most effectively you need to understand what …

Busy database-backed websites often hit scalability limits in the database first. In tuning MySQL, one of the first things to look at is the max_connections parameter, which is often too low. (Of course another thing to look at is appropriate fragment caching in your app server, HTTP object caching in your web server, and a CDN in front of it all.)

When using MySQL 5.5 from Oracle's RPMs through cPanel (MySQL55-server-5.5.32-1.cp1136) on RHEL 5.10 x86_64, there is an interesting problem if you try to increase the max_connections setting beyond 214 in /etc/my.cnf. It will silently be ignored, and the limit remains 214:

mysql> show variables like 'max_connections';
+-----------------+-------+
| Variable_name   | Value |
+-----------------+-------+
| max_connections | 214   |
+-----------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The problem is that the maximum number of open files allowed is too small, by default 1024, to …

One of the routine tasks for a DBA is renaming database schemas, and as such MySQL added a command to carry out that purpose called “RENAME DATABASE <database_name>”. However this command just made it through a few minor releases before being discontinued (from MySQL 5.1.7 to 5.1.23). Here’s a link to the reference manual regarding the command http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/rename-database.html. Vadim wrote a MySQL Performance Blog post about this a few years ago where he mentions the dangerous nature of this command – that post was appropriately headlined, “Dangerous Command.” Today we will see what are the ways in which a database schema can be renamed and which of them is the quickest.

Method 1: A …

As noted in a previous post, MySQL Connector/Java supports multi-master replication topographies as of version 5.1.27, allowing you to scale read load to slaves while directing write traffic to multi-master (or replication ring) servers.  The new release of version 5.1.28 builds upon this, allowing live management of replication host (single or multi-master) topographies.  This parallels functionality that has long existed for load-balanced connections, and enables users to add or remove hosts – or now promote slaves – for Java applications without requiring application restart.  This post aims to …