The other day it struck me that MySQL applications have no fewer than four sources to be able to collect potentially slow queries for analysis, and that I actually find myself using 3/4 methods available.

Here are the methods listed, and my commentary on where I will use each of them:

Application Logging/Monitoring

I enjoy using Application-level tools such as New Relic or xhprof to find slow experiences rather than just slow queries.

What I mean by this, is that there is not a 1:1 between pages and queries, so sometimes just heading straight to the database can be the wrong decision. As I wrote on Monday, latency is a factor with N+1 queries, and I …

Recently, I helped a client that was having issues with deployments causing locking in their production databases.  At a high level, the two key components used in the environment were:

• Capistrano (scripted deployments) [website]
• Liquibase (database version control) [website]

At a high level, they currently used a CLI call to Liquibase as a sub-task within a larger deployment task.  The goal of this engagement was to modify that sub-task to run Liquibase in a non-blocking fashion as opposed to the default that just runs native ALTERS against the database.

As I wasn’t very familiar with Liquibase, I took this opportunity to learn more about it and it seems like a very valuable tool.  Essentially, it does the following:

• Adds two version control tables to …

Percona is glad to announce the first Beta release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 on November 21st, 2013. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories.

Based on Percona Server 5.6.14-62.0 including all the bug fixes in it, Galera Replicator 3.1 and on Codership wsrep API 5.6.14-25.1 is …

Next week the US celebrates Thanksgiving Day. For those that are American or live here, this is a significant event. Three different experiences recently have lead me to write this request for ALL MySQL community members to give thanks to those that have contributed to the MySQL ecosystem. I have made a commitment to myself, and I would like to challenge others to write one book review per week in December, that’s 4 book reviews to the MySQL books that I have on my bookshelf that have made an impact in some way. I ask others to give it a go too.

It only takes a few minutes to pen a comment on Amazon, or a publishers site, but to authors it means so much more. I can only speak for myself, but any comment; good, bad or ugly; helps to know you are out there and you took the time to acknowledge somebody’s work of art (in this case a publication).

I only have to look at my bookshelf and I find the following MySQL books (in …

It is a rather frequent problem to have to manage Virtual IP addresses (VIPs) with a Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) or with MySQL master HA (MHA). In order to help solving these problems, I wrote a Pacemaker agent, mysql_monitor that is a simplified version of the mysql_prm agent. The mysql_monitor agent only monitors MySQL and set attributes according to the state of MySQL, the read-only variable, the slave status and/or the output of the clustercheck script for PXC. The agent can operate in 3 modes or cluster types: replication (default), pxc and read-only.

The simplest mode is read-only, only the state of the read_only variable is looked at. If the node has the read_only variable set to OFF, then the writer is set to 1 and reader attributes is set to 1 while if the node has read_only set to ON, the writer attributes will …

The binary and source versions of MySQL Cluster 7.3.3 have now been made available at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/.

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.3.3 (compared to 7.3.2) is available from the 7.3.3 Change log.

The binary version for MySQL Cluster 7.2.14 has now been made available at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/.

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.2.14 (compared to 7.2.13) is available from the 7.2.14 Change log.

The binary and source versions of MySQL Cluster 7.1.29 have now been made available at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/.

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.1.29 (compared to 7.1.28) is available from the 7.1.29 Change log.

This week we discuss MySQL's Migration Toolkit. Ear Candy is about the replication format as it propagates through multi-tier master and slaves; At the Movies is Distributed Data Analysis with Hadoop and R.

MySQL Migration Toolkit
Episode 161 where we talked about how MySQL Workbench is a replacement for the older MySQL GUI Tools, including the MySQL Migration Toolkit.

New Migration Toolkit in MySQL Workbench.
Installing ODBC Drivers for use with the Migration Toolkit.

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Since MariaDB aims to be a compatible/drop-in replacement to MySQL, its crucial that in 10.0 we support all the 5.6 options/system variables, else we have to clearly document them in the Knowledgebase article MariaDB versus MySQL – Compatibility.

To this extent, Sergey Vojtovich (svoj) has created MDEV-5277 as a tracker. There is also plenty of discussion on this topic at the maria-developers mailing list. I encourage current users of MySQL 5.6 to take a look at the list and comment either in Jira or on the mailing list to ensure that when …