You can watch the video of my linux.conf.au 2014 talk here: http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2014/Wednesday/28-Past_Present_and_future_of_MySQL_and_variants_-_Stewart_Smith.mp4

But let’s talk about things in blog form rather than video form :)

Back in 1979, there was UNIREG. A text UI to records (rows) in a database (err, table). The reason I mention UNIREG is that it had FoRMs which as you may have guessed by my capitalization there is where the FRM file comes from.

In 1986, UNIREG came to UNIX. That’s right kids, the 80×24 VT100 interface to ISAM (Index Sequential Access Method – basically rows are written in insert order and indexes point to them) came to UNIX. There was no generic query language, just FoRMs and reports. In fact, to this day, that …

Like a lot of developers I started using a MacBook Pro around the time of Tiger.  I instantly loved it:  simple, fast, and virtually no system administration overhead. The genius of OS X was that it never got in the way. You opened the box, pulled out the machine, and got to work. It had a great user interface, excellent  development tools (Eclipse in my case) and the command utilities like ssh, rsync, and bash worked seamlessly with Linux systems.

Well, that was then and this is now. Starting with Lion I began to spend an increasing amount of time fighting OS X instead of getting work done. I'm now using Mavericks and have not seen much improvement, in fact quite the contrary. Here are just a few of the problems after the Lion to Mavericks upgrade:

• Spotlight indexes destroyed; need 2 days to regenerate
• AppleMail access to Gmail IMAP  broken
• Time Machine stuck in …

This week, we talk with Ivan Zoratti of SkySQL about MaxScale, a new MySQL proxy. Ear Candy is about accidentally removing a dependent package, and At the Movies is a DB Hangops recording of MaxScale, replication saturation and monitoring.

Events
DB Hangops - every other Wednesay at noon Pacific time
Upcoming MySQL events, including Tech Tours

Training
SkySQL Trainings
Tungsten University trainings

read more

February 3, 2014 By Severalnines

Liferay is an open-source content management system written in Java. It is used by a number of high traffic sites, as this survey suggests. 

Clustering Liferay and other components such as the database and the file system is a good way to handle the performance requirements of a high traffic site. The latest Liferay version has introduced features that simplify clustering, such as built-in support for Ehcache clustering, Lucene replication, read/write splitting capabilities for database (in case if you run on master-slave architecture) and support for various file systems for the portal repository. 

In this post, we are going to show you how to cluster Liferay in a multi-node load-balanced setup. The database backend will be based on Galera Cluster for MySQL, and the file …

If you’re running MySQL 5.7, you might have noticed the ibtmp1 file located in the datadir, and you might be wondering exactly what this file is.

In 5.7, InnoDB added a separate tablespace for all non-compressed InnoDB temporary tables. This new tablespace is named ibtmp1 and is located in the datadir by default.

“The new tablespace is always recreated on server startup. … A newly added configuration file option, innodb_temp_data_file_path, allows for a user-defined temporary data file path. For related information, see InnoDB Temporary Table Undo Logs.”

You can read that, and the full changelog entry, here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/5.7/en/news-5-7-1.html

And the full variable description is here:

…

I’m looking forward to being at Percona Live Santa Clara 2014 later this year (April 1-4 2014). You should definitely register now. Early bird ends soon, and if you’re looking for a discount, here’s a 10% discount code - SeeMeSpeak. 

SkySQL will have a booth. I’m hoping the DotOrg Pavillions continue, so that MariaDB can have a booth too.

If you want to know about MariaDB 10, come to the complete tutorial given by Ivan Zoratti and me. MariaDB 10 …

I wish more discussion happened on the internals mailing list, but if you’re interested in finding out what’s upcoming/changing in MySQL 5.7, so far the best resources I’ve found are:

• The video (1h41m is worth a watch), and blog post from Todd Farmer
• A presentation from Morgan Tocker (I wonder if we’ll see this at FOSDEM too)
• All of Morgan Tocker’s posts tagged community
• The 5.7 release …

I’ve blogged about metadata locks (MDL) in the past (1 2 3) and in particular discussed how best to track them down and troubleshoot threads stuck waiting on metadata locks.

If you’ve had any experience with these, you’ll know finding them isn’t always the most straight-forward task.

So I was glad to see metadata lock instrumentation added to MySQL 5.7.3 as part of performance_schema, which makes tracking these down a breeze! (Note this is only in 5.7.3 currently, and therefore is some time from being GA as of today)!

To use these, performance_schema must be enabled (i.e., performance_schema=1 in your config file).

But, also, the metadata_locks instrument is disabled by default, so even if you enable the …

I believe in automation as much as possible, and I'm always working to make the day to day tasks of operations as smooth as possible.  Also I try not to be afraid to take good tools and make them better.

Here in Database Ops at Box, we use pt-kill running as a service to constantly monitor our servers and help protect against long running queries.  But our thresholds are pretty generous, and in some cases it's possible for unforeseen circumstances to cause enough queries to storm the database such that we can have problems before any of them hit the threshold for "busy time."  Ditto for idle connections.

The response is that someone has to be available to manually run another copy of pt-kill with much lower thresholds to clear out these thundering herds.  But what if we could let pt-kill handle both the "normal" mode and still protect us from herds?

That's what we've done by adding a …

ConFoo, the conference for web developers, is hosting its fifth edition. It will take place in Montreal at the Hilton Bonaventure on February 26th – 28th. These five days are packed with great technical talks and semi-private trainings on your favorite technologies.

It’s definitely a conference for IT professionals, wether you are a developer, integrator or project manager. With its 150 talks, you are sure to find a presentation that will help you grow your core skills. Among them you can find :

• Mobile development
• Cloud computing
• Project management
• Databases and big data
• Development with PHP, Ruby, Java, DotNet, Python and Javascript
• Web security
• …

Meet the experts who crafted your programming language or framework, and who push the technology to a new level. Exchange …