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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On Wednesday I gave a presentation on “How to Avoid Even More Common (but Deadly) MySQL Development Mistakes” for Percona MySQL Webinars.  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: Disk bandwidth also not infinite

Indeed, you’re right! …

This is the second part of my series on High Availability with mysqlnd_ms. In my first post, “Simple MySQL Master HA with mysqlnd_ms,” I showed a simple HA solution using asynchronous MySQL replication. This time we will see how to leverage an all-primary cluster where you can write to all nodes. In this post I used Percona XtraDB Cluster, but you should also be able to do the same with MySQL NDB Cluster or Tungsten Replicator.

To start with, here is the mysqlnd_ms configuration I used:

mysqlnd_ms_mm.ini

.  All of these files are available from my Github repository. Below, I have three Percona XtraDB Cluster nodes, …

I had the pleasure of presenting to the PHP Users Group Philippines a few days ago about mysqlnd_ms. The mysqlnd plugin, MySQL Master Slave, is a transparent layer on top of mysqlnd extension. This allows you to do read-write splitting and slave reads load balancing without needing to change anything from your application. But do you know you can also achieve a form of high availability with this plugin? I shared 2 forms on my presentation, using async MySQL replication either in master-slave configuration or master-master configuration, while the second form is having an all primary cluster where you can write to all nodes.

This first part is to demonstrate how you can achieve a simple HA solution using the first form. First, all the sample code here can be found on my GitHub repository. So, to use the mysqlnd_ms plugin, it uses …

This comes from an issue that I worked on recently, wherein a customer reported that their application was working fine under stock MySQL 5.6 but producing erroneous results when they tried running it on Amazon RDS 5.6. They had a table which, on the working server, contained two TIMESTAMP columns, one which defaulted to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and the other which defaulted to ’0000-00-00 00:00:00′, like so:

CREATE TABLE mysql56 (
  id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
  ts1 TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  ts2 TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
);

However, under Amazon RDS, the same table looked like this:

CREATE TABLE rds56 ( 
  id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
  ts1 TIMESTAMP NULL DEFAULT NULL,
  ts2 TIMESTAMP NULL DEFAULT NULL, 
);

They mentioned that their schema contains TIMESTAMP column definitions without any modifiers for nullability or …