The packages that are available in the yum repos contain a number of enhancements over the RPM packages that are available from dev.mysql.com.

Norvald blogged on some of these enhancements earlier. Today I wanted to walk through a safe upgrade path, as they are not quite compatible with each-other.

My Existing Installation

To start with, the packages I have installed came from “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 / Oracle Linux 6 (x86, 64-bit), RPM Bundle” on dev.mysql.com. You can check which packages you have installed with:

[root@localhost ~]# rpm -qa | grep -i mysql
MySQL-client-5.6.14-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-embedded-5.6.14-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-server-5.6.14-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-shared-5.6.14-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-devel-5.6.14-1.el6.x86_64 …

At the Brainiac Corner, we meet with some of the sharpest minds in the system, database, devops, and IT world. If you’d like to share your thoughts on pirates, ninjas, the future of system administration, or any other relevant topic, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

This week we are lucky to interview Sam Lambert, GitHub Database Administrator, and general all around badass. When he’s not surrounded by many leather bound books, Sam tweets @isamlambert, even sometimes about VividCortex

How did you get from stork to brainiac (i.e. …

Drupal is one of the most popular open source CMS applications available – and it runs primarily on a MySQL backend.  Out of the box, the schema is well tuned and indexed.  However, there are some ways to tweak the default installation to get more out of the system right from start.  Similarly, there is a fair bit of hidden flexibility (especially in the latest version) in terms of database configuration.

In a free MySQL webinar on Wednesday, November 13th at 1pm EST, I’ll go over some of the improvements in Drupal 7 in terms of database connectivity and operation as well as profile the default installation from the database perspective.  I’ll also be covering some of the ways to optimize the default application and detailing some of the ways to benchmark your installation.

The title …

Dan McKinley (Etsy) wrote an [IMHO] insightful article Why MongoDB Never Worked at Etsy.

First off, it’s important to realise that it’s not a snipe at MongoDB – it’s a fine tool.

The lessons are related to mixing multiple databases in a deployment (administration and monitoring overhead) and the acknowledgement that issues of schema design, scalability and maintenance need attention regardless of which brand or technology you pick for your database. That comes back to the old insight that migrations are rarely worth it (regardless of what you migrate to what).

I think these are indeed important considerations as they have a major impact on the ongoing costs of your entire environment (production as well as development and testing) – these days we encounter the “we’re doing this part of our application using MongoDB” …

#DBHangOps 11/13/13 -- MySQL setup through Puppet!

Here's the recording. Be sure to view the presentation and show notes below:

Hello everyone!

Participate in #DBHangOps this Wednesday, November 13th, 2013 at 12:00pm pacific (19:00 GMT), to hear about:

• How do you ramp up new DBAs?

  • How do you ramp up a non-DBA to being a DBA?
• How Mozilla manages MySQL through puppet

• MySQL-isms!

  • (From Gerry) Sub SELECTs -- Why aren't these as mature as other databases?
  • (From Daniel) GROUP_CONCAT and other OLAP Style query functions -- Why doesn't MySQL have them?
  • (From Gerry) MySQL DBAs are used to building covering indexes to avoid PK lookups -- Is there a plan …

The new Continuent Tungsten 2.0.1 is now available. Continuent Tungsten 2.0.1 is the first generally available release of Continuent Tungsten 2.0, which offers major improvements to Continuent's industry-leading database-as-a-service offering. 

New features:

Replication

Provides low-impact, real-time replication with up-to 5X throughput over native MySQL and over 100X reduction in

Percona Server 5.6.11-60.3 has introduced a new feature called Log Archiving for XtraDB. This feature makes copies of the old log files before they are overwritten, thus saving all the redo log for a write workload.

When log archiving is enabled, it duplicates all redo log writes in a separate set of files in addition to normal redo log writing, creating new files as necessary.

Archived log file name format is ib_log_archive_startlsn. The start LSN marks the log sequence number when the archive was started. An example of the archived log files should look like this:

ib_log_archive_00000000010145937920
ib_log_archive_00000000010196267520

In order to …

Dear MySQL users,

MySQL Connector/Net 6.8.1, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is a beta release for 6.8.x and it's not recommended for production environments.

It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6

It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

The 6.8.1 version of MySQL Connector/Net has support for Entity Framework 6.0

The release is available to download at  …

Using the MySQL 5.6 Performance Schema it is very easy to see what is actually running on your MySQL instance. No more sampling or installing software or worrying about disk I/O performance with techniques like SHOW PROCESSLIST, enabling the general query log or sniffing the TCP/IP stack.

The following SQL is used to give me a quick 60 second view on a running MySQL system of ALL statements executed.

use performance_schema;
update setup_consumers set enabled='YES' where name IN ('events_statements_history','events_statements_current','statements_digest');
truncate table events_statements_current; truncate table events_statements_history; truncate table events_statements_summary_by_digest;
do sleep(60);
select now(),(count_star/(select sum(count_star) FROM events_statements_summary_by_digest) * 100) as pct, count_star, left(digest_text,150) as stmt, digest from events_statements_summary_by_digest order by 2 desc;
update setup_consumers set …