With the General Availability of the standalone MySQL Utilities it now makes sense to use these to simplify (and optionally automate) your MySQL Replication and High Availability solutions. In light of that, 4 of our MySQL white papers have been updated to reflect the new opportunities:

MySQL Guide to High Availability Solutions. Data is the currency of today’s web, mobile, social, enterprise and cloud applications. Ensuring data is always available is a top priority for any organization – minutes of downtime will result in significant loss of …

Time zones are a tricky feature. You live in a given time zone, and most of the time you won’t think about that at all. You may live in a place where you are conscious of time zones, such as the United States, if your business spans across the country, where you know that New York is three hours ahead of San Francisco or Chicago and Dallas share the same time zone. Time Zone support in MySQL is a complicate business in itself. Once you have updated your time zone tables, you can set your time zone in an human readable format:

set global time_zone="America/Los_Angeles";

This is nice and well. It tells you which time zone your server is working with. However, things get a bit hairy when you need to do practical …

Percona Server is bundled with the PAM plugin which opens a plethora of ways to authenticate to MySQL such as restricting time when users can connect to MySQL, authenticate via a USB key, authenticate to an external authentication system such as LDAP and many, many more PAM compatible mechanisms.

If you want to use PAM authentication on the community version of MySQL, you may follow the instructions here to get it working on your system. If you want to test PAM authentication, the simplest way is to authenticate via /etc/shadow. The steps do so can be found in here or you can follow the steps below.

Here’s a primer for setting up …

The MySQL Connect conference is a great opportunity to engage with the MySQL community, as well as the engineers who work on the MySQL technologies at Oracle. The conference takes place on September 21-23 in San Francisco. There are 84 sessions in total, the full list being available here.

I will be presenting this year too. Sveta and I will be talking about how you can best …

It is hard to believe it is already closing in on a year since the last MySQL Connect, but it is true, it is time to start preparing again.

This year MySQL Connect will take place in the weekend of 21-23 September with the Monday being dedicated to tutorials. As last year MySQL Connect is part of Oracle OpenWorld and is hosted at Hilton, San Francisco Union Square.

I am fortunate enough this year to be taking part in three sessions:

• Meet the MySQL Community and Support Teams [BOF2480]
  Join MySQL community and support team members in this BOF to ask all your questions as well as provide feedback, …

There was some suggestion after my previous post (Who works on MariaDB and MySQL?) that I look at MariaDB 10.0 – so I have. My working was very simple, in a current MariaDB 10.0 BZR tree (somewhat beyond 10.0.3), I ran the following command:

bzr log -n0 -rtag:mariadb-10.0.0..|egrep '(author|committer): '| \
  sed -e 's/^\s*//; s/committer: //; s/author: //'| \
  sort -u|grep -iv oracle

MariaDB foundation/MontyProgram/SkySQL:

1. Alexander Barkov
2. Alexey Botchkov
3. Daniel Bartholomew
4. Elena Stepanova
5. Igor Babaev
6. Jani Tolonen
7. knielsen
8. Michael Widenius
9. sanja
10. Sergei Golubchik
11. Sergey Petrunya
12. Sergey Vojtovich
13. timour
14. Vladislav Vaintroub …

I recently got pointed towards https://github.com/shodanium/nanomysql/ which is a tiny (less than 400 lines of C++) MySQL client library which is GPL licensed.

If you need to link into non-GPL compatible code, there is the (slightly larger and full featured) libdrizzle library. But if you want something *tiny* and are okay with GPL, then nanomysql may be something to look at.

Two of the more popular solutions are  MySQL Master HA and Percona Replication Manager.

MySQL Master HA

MHA is based on a set of Perl scripts that monitors for replication and server health. When a failover scenario will happen, it can do automatic failover to a slave OR from a selection of slaves you have configured to make as the new master. The good thing about this is, after the initial failover, there will be no succeeding attempts to fail back, this is to protect your data and consistency of the cluster. You can also configure to only have manual failover for scheduled maintenance and the like. Between PRM and MHA, MHA is really easier to manage.

http://code.google.com/p/mysql-master-ha/

Percona Replication Manager

PRM is based on …

The sessions for this year’s MySQL Connect conference have now been scheduled – as you can see below, my 2 MySQL Cluster sessions will be on Saturday 21st September at 11:30 and 14:30 (Pacific).

The MySQL Connect conference is a great opportunity to listen to and chat with people from the MySQL community – including the engineers who work on or around MySQL as well people who are using it in production. The conference takes place from 21-23 September in San Francisco (runs up to Oracle OpenWorld). There are 84 sessions scheduled and the content catalog has now been published.

I’ll be …

Do you know this scenario: you are writing down  a stored procedure but you can’t for the life of you remember the exact syntax of that CASE statement? Has it to end with CASE or not? Can I use more than one WHEN part and how should that be written? Usually you end up opening a web page and read through the excellent MySQL online docs. However, this might cost too much time if you quickly need different statements and other detail info. Here’s where MySQL Workbench’s context help jumps in.

The server can help

It’s probably only known to the die-hard terminal operators who write most of their SQL queries in a MySQL console window: the MySQL server already has a stripped down set of help topics produced by the Docs team. That means you can always get at least the syntax but often far more information for a particular syntax element when you work with a server. When you …