Next Wednesday (November 20th, at 10 am PST), Ryan Lowe (Percona: Principle Consultant) and Andrew Aksyonoff (Sphinx: CEO and CTO) will be delivering a webinar on how to configure Sphinx for MySQL. “How to Optimally Configure Sphinx for MySQL” The discussion will center around getting started with, and seamlessly integrating, Sphinx into your MySQL-based applications. [...]

I have spent the better part of the last month at Big Data conferences trying to see behind the $2.5 million in marketing smoke to see what is really going to be showing up on the to-do list of DBAs. The first bit of news is that half the vendors at shows like Strata or Big Data Techon will probably be gone by this time next year. So picking a vendor right now is a little iffy. Hadoop’s ecosystem is flourishing and will surely be around for some time but the vendors are playing musical chairs.

But we are Open Source and we do not need vendors! Well, yes and no. The good folks at Cloudera and Horton Works have done you a big favor by providing wonderful tutorials that are worth your time to see. Recently two former MySQL-ers, Sarah Sproehnle and Ian Wrigley, have put together Udacity that concisely teaches Hadoop technology and Cloudera deserves a round of applause for this …

I recently had an issue with a client where they needed developers to have enforced lag on master/slave dev setup. There were issues where slave lag wasn't accounted for and with their previous development setup they never had lag. We needed to essentially always have some amount of slave lag so these bugs were exposed. My first thought was to use pt-slave-delay, which is part of the Percona toolkit. As an initial stab at solving the problem I configured pt-slave-delay for 30 seconds of replication lag and have it check every 15 seconds for the amount of current delay. I did something like this:

pt-slave-delay --delay 30s --interval 15s --daemonize 127.0.0.1 --log /var/log/pt-slave-status/pt-slave-delay.log

The problem was that, like many development environments, this development environement didn't have a very large amount of traffic. This caused the repliction lag to be uneven. Not really idea. …

Before there was information_schema and performance_schema, there were InnoDB Monitor tables.

What the monitor tables are, is a way of communicating directly to the InnoDB storage engine by creating a table of a special name. Additional debugging information is then written to MySQL’s error log. For example:

CREATE TABLE innodb_monitor (a INT) ENGINE=INNODB;

/* view to the error log */

DROP TABLE innodb_monitor;

There’s a number of problems with this approach:

1. By using a magic table name, there is no immediate feedback for typos or spelling errors in monitor table names. The user has to wait to see if the error log is written to, and then debug if not.
2. The monitors will continually write to the error log as long as the magic table still exists. This can reduce the …

November 14, 2013 By Severalnines

Database schema changes are usually not popular among DBAs or sysadmins, not when you are operating a cluster and cannot afford to switch off the service during a maintenance window. There are different ways to perform schema changes, some procedures being more complicated than others. We invited Seppo from the Codership team to tell us about the options. If you’d like to learn more, please register for our new webinar.

Webinar: Galera Cluster Best Practices - Zero Downtime Schema Changes

Tuesday, December 3rd 2013

Register now - Europe/MEA/APAC

…

"Amazon to add Postgres to its most-favored database list" says GigaOM:
http://gigaom.com/2013/11/12/amazon-to-add-postgres-to-its-most-favored-database-list/"To many this is no-brainer. Amazon wants to support the databases that its developer audiences want to use. This is simply a  case of Amazon responding to user demand and oh-by-the-way making its cloud infrastructure more attractive to a specific target audience. Some say Postgres has gained traction since Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via its Sun buyout a few years back."
Some people I know said "yea, the writing was on the wall...". Well, was it?? Really? 
AWS finally got the time to "plan" for supporting Postgres now? After supporting MySQL, Oracle and SQL Servers for almost 3 years?! Writing was on the wall? Where can I find a wall …

Oracle MySQL participated at the Open Source India at the NIMHANS convention center on 11-13 Nov 2013 (http://osidays.com/osidays/).

This is the third year we participated and yours truly had the pleasure to deliver the keynote about MySQL. Was also invited to participate in a panel discussion on the importance of certification.

OSI has become the meeting place for all open source professionals at Bangalore. It was a pleasure to meet with old friends who are passionate about open source.

There were a number of interesting talks. Many open source companies had their booths at the exhibition center and all seemed to be buzzing with activity.

We were informally informed that there were about 800 attendees on Day 1.

We received many positive comments about the panel discussion on the importance of certification. The discussion concluded that …

So here goes …

While there are already some blog postings from me at Oracle’s MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB) team blog at https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlenterprisebackup/, this blog is for my personal views and views outside of MEB.

Why the name with 2c.
The first challenge before you think of blogging is to convice yourself that maybe your views will have some value for a reader. The second is to find a name of the blog. Its not that I am fully convinced of the former but there are some things that need to be written and since the need is mine the fulfillment of the need should also come from me.

The name is to ensure to keep my words humble and respect views which may differ from mine; maybe conflicting and still right. Different people have differing views and this blog is just one view as seen by me for now.

The tagline …

Sphinx is a free, open-source search server that integrates nicely with MySQL. It provides a fast, scalable, and pluggable search framework. The Sphinx engine possesses a variety of tools enabling you to customize how searching/indexing interacts with or becomes a part of your environment.

Join me and Sphinx Search CEO/CTO Andrew Aksyonoff, the founder and creative force behind Sphinx, on Wednesday, November 20th at 10 a.m. PST as we discuss how to get started with Sphinx and seamlessly integrate it into your applications and MySQL. The title of our webinar is, “How to Optimally Configure Sphinx Search for MySQL” and you can register …

MariaDB 10.0 has SHOW EXPLAIN feature. It was coded by yours truly and first introduced about a year ago. Last release of MySQL 5.7 introduced EXPLAIN FOR CONNECTION, which looks rather similar to MariaDB’s SHOW EXPLAIN. I was wondering how these two compare.

The basics

The usage scenarios are similar. In both cases, you first need a connection id of a running query. It is typically obtained by running SHOW PROCESSLIST:

MariaDB [(none)]> show processlist;
+----+------+-----------+----------+---------+------+--------------+-----------------------------+----------+
| Id | User | Host      | db       | Command | Time | State        | Info                        | Progress | …