After we released pquery to the community, and as we started logging bug reports with pquery testcases, it quickly became clear that pquery binaries with statically compiled-in client libraries would be of great convenience, both for ourselves and for the community.

(If you haven’t heard about pquery yet, read the pquery introduction blog post, come and join the pquery introduction lightning talk at Percona Live (15 April just around 6PM in Hall A), or keep an eye out for some of the upcoming episodes in the …

Two years ago Ovais Tariq had explained in detail what kinds of problems existed before MySQL introduced metadata locks in 5.5.3 and how these locks help to prevent them. Still, some implications of metadata locking in MySQL remain unclear for users – DBAs and even software developers that target recent MySQL versions. I’ve decided to include a slide or two into the presentation about InnoDB locks and deadlocks I plan to make (with my colleague Nilnandan Joshi) on April 16 at Percona Live 2015.

I decided to do this as …

MySQL QA Episode #1: Bash/GNU Tools & Linux Upskill & Scripting Fun

This episode consists of 13 parts, and an introduction. See videos below

In HD quality (set your player to 720p!)

Introduction

Part 1: echo, ls, cp, rm, vi, cat, df, du, tee, cd, clear, uname, date, time, cat, mkdir

Part 2: find, wc, sort, shuf, tr, mkdir, man, more

Part 3: Redirection, tee, stdout, stderr, /dev/null, cat

Part 4: Vars, ‘ vs “, $0, $$, $!, screen, chmod, chown, export, set, whoami, sleep, kill, sh, grep, sudo, su, pwd

Part 5: grep, regex (regular expressions), tr

Part 6: sed, regex (regular expressions)

Part 7: awk

Part 8: xargs

Part 9: subshells, shells, …

Welcome to the MySQL QA Training Series!

If you have not read our introductory blog post on pquery yet, I’d recommend reading that one first to get a bit of background. The community is enthuastic about pquery, and today I am happy to announce a full training series on pquery and more. Whether you are a Linux or MySQL newbie or a seasoned QA engineer, there is something here for you. From Bash scripting (see episode 1 below), to every aspect of the new pquery framework, it is my hope that you enjoy this series. If you do, please leave us a comment

Database quality assurance is not as straightforward as it may seem. It’s not a matter of point-and-click, but rather of many intertwined tools and scripts. Beyond that, due to the complexity of the underlying product, it’s about having an overall plan or …

Being a QA Engineer, how would you feel if you had access to a framework which can generate 80+ crashes – a mix of hitting developer introduced assertions (situations that should not happen), and serious unforeseen binary crashes – for the world’s most popular open source database software – each and ever hour? What if you could do this running on a medium spec machine – even a laptop?

The seniors amongst you may object “But… generating a crash or assertion is one thing – creating a repeatable testcase for the same is quite another.”

Introducing pquery, mtr_to_sql, reducer.sh (the pquery-enabled version), and more:

80+ coredumps per hour. Fully automatic testcase creation. Near-100% testcase reproducibility. C++ core. 15 Seconds run time per trial. Up to 20-25k lines of SQL executed per trial. CLI testcases. Compatible with sporadic issues. High-end automation of many aspects.

It all …

This is yet another story of Django web-framework with time zone support and pain dealing with python datetimes and MySQL on the backend. In other words, offset-naive vs offset-aware datetimes.

Shortly, more about the problem. After reading the official documentation about the time zones, it makes clear that in order to reflect python datetime in the necessary time zone you need to make it tz-aware first and than show in that time zone.

Here is the first issue: tz-aware in what time zone? MySQL stores timestamps in UTC and converts for storage/retrieval from/to the current time zone. By default, the current time zone is the server’s time, can be changed on MySQL globally, per connection etc. So it becomes not obvious what was tz of the value initially before stored in UTC. If you …

One of the big announcements at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2014 conference this week was the unveiling of Aurora. The result of years of internal work, Aurora, currently in preview, is a MySQL 5.6-compatible option that “combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases” on the AWS infrastructure. The Aurora database engine will be made available through the Amazon RDS for Aurora service. This new database option is another example of the vibrant innovation coming from the MySQL ecosystem and key role that relational databases play in applications of today and …

Yesterday (Oct. 22) I gave a presentation titled “MySQL 5.6 Full Text Search Throwdown.” If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as we had time for during the session, but here are all the questions with my complete answers:

Q: Does Solr automatically maintain its index against MySQL? Do you have to hit the Solr server with a specific query to keep the index ‘warm’?

There are several strategies for updating a Solr …

Recently I encountered a specific situation in which a customer was forced to stay with the MyISAM engine due to a legacy application using tables with over 1000 columns. Unfortunately InnoDB has a limit at this point. I did not expect to hear this argument for MyISAM. It is usually about full text search or spatial indexes functionality that were missing in InnoDB, and which were introduced in MySQL 5.6 and 5.7, respectively, to let people forget about MyISAM. In this case though, InnoDB still could not be used, so I gave the TokuDB a try.

I’ve created a simple bash script to generate a SQL file with …

Twice each year members of the global open-source community converge on London in November and Santa Clara in April to network with, and learn from, some of the world’s most experienced and accomplished system architects, developers and DBAs.

And now it’s time for YOU to give back to this diverse and growing MySQL community. The Call for Speakers for Percona Live London (Nov. 3-4) closes Aug. 17 and the deadline for submitting talks for the ever-growing Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (April 13-16, 2015) expires Nov. 9.

If you like putting things off until the last minute, then it’s time to get to work! Aug. 17 is just two days away and November will be here before you know it (think of how fast summer has gone by already).

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