While I was working on my grFailOver POC, I have also done some additional parallel testing. One of them was to see how online DDL are executed inside a Group Replication cluster.

The online DDL feature provides support for instant and in-place table alterations and concurrent DML. Checking the Group Replication (GR) official documentation I was trying to identify if any limitation exists, but the only thing I have found was:

"Concurrent DDL versus DML Operations.  Concurrent data definition statements and data manipulation statements executing against the same object but on different servers is not supported when using multi-primary mode. During execution of Data Definition Language (DDL) statements on an object, executing concurrent Data Manipulation Language (DML) on the same object but on a different server instance has the risk of conflicting DDL executing on different instances not being detected."

This …

AKA Cluster Error Voting

What is Cluster Error Voting (CEV)?

“Cluster Error Voting is a new feature implemented by Alexey Yurchenko, and it is a protocol for nodes to decide how the cluster will react to problems in replication. When one or several nodes have an issue to apply an incoming transaction(s) (e.g. suspected inconsistency), this new feature helps. In a 5-node cluster, if 2-nodes fail to apply the transaction, they get removed and a DBA can go in to fix what went wrong so that the nodes can rejoin the cluster. (Seppo Jaakola)”

This feature was ported to Percona PXC in version 8.0.21, and as indicated above, it is about increasing the resilience of the cluster especially when TWO nodes fail to operate and may drop from the cluster abruptly. The protocol is activated in a cluster with any number of nodes.  

Before CEV if a node has a problem/error during a transaction, …

In the late 1990s I learned MySQL and Java at approximately the same time. How did I teach myself? For MySQL I read the online MySQL manual cover to cover. For Java it was the Java Language Specification or Java Programming Language book, again cover to cover. Then for record I read Effective Java, and I was totally lost. I read it three or four years later and then it made sense.

At that time, with MySQL 3.22/3.23 the scope of the product was smaller, so was Java 1.2. I am confident I have forgotten as much as I retain, however it does marvel me when sometimes the most simplest of functionality I do not recall, or perhaps never learned. Today’s What Did I Learn This Week.

In MySQL, there is a TRIM() function, as the name suggests it trims whitespace, or so I thought. It actually does a lot more as the current MySQL 8.0 manual …

From MySQL Shell 8.0.24, it’s possible to log all the SQL statements issued in MySQL Shell.

Everything is well documented in the dedicated manual section: System Logging for SQL Statements.

Let’s see it in action. We will first start MySQL Shell with --syslog option:

$ mysqlsh --syslog --sql root@localhost

We enter a statement:

MySQL  localhost:33060+   2021-04-30 09:18:39 
SQL  show databases;
+-------------------------------+
| Database                      |
+-------------------------------+
| bookstore                     |
| clusterdemo                   |
...

And we can verify in syslog if something has been logged. I use Systemd and Journald therefor I will …

While testing a XA transactions based workload, I noticed in the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS;

---TRANSACTION 108674, ACTIVE (PREPARED) 35 sec
4 lock struct(s), heap size 1136, 5 row lock(s), undo log entries 2

So far, so good. A XA transaction has been PREPARED, and reported as such. But after a while (and I was not really looking at the session), I repeated the command and the output turned to:

---TRANSACTION 108674, ACTIVE (PREPARED) 91 sec recovered trx
4 lock struct(s), heap size 1136, 5 row lock(s), undo log entries 2

I went to check logs, because XA transactions are recovered after MySQL Server restart, and I made sure …

Release of RonDB 21.04.0

RonDB is based on MySQL NDB Cluster optimised for use in modern cloud settings. Today we launch RonDB 21.04.0. In RonDB 21.04.0 we have integrated benchmark scripts to execute various benchmarks towards RonDB.

There are three ways of using RonDB. The first is using the managed version provided by Logical Clocks. This is currently available in AWS and is currently being developed to also support Azure. This is still in limited access mode. To access it contact Logical Clocks at the rondb.com website.

The second way is to use a script provided by Logical Clocks that automates the creation of VMs and the installation of the software components required by RonDB. These scripts are available to create RonDB clusters on Azure and GCP (Google Cloud). This script can be downloaded from nexus.hops.works/rondb-cloud-installer.sh.

Introduction In this article, I’m going to explain how we can index JSON columns when using MySQL. While other relational database systems provide GIN (Generalized Inverted Index) indexes, MySQL allows you to index a virtual column that mirrors the JSON path expression you are interested in indexing. Database table Let’s assume we have the following database book table: The properties column type is json, so we can store JSON objects as book properties. Querying MySQL JSON columns without an index If we try to filter one record by its associated title attribute... Read More

The post How to index JSON columns using MySQL appeared first on Vlad Mihalcea.

This blog post will show how to compile the Percona XtraBackup (PXB) tool for ARM. For this, we are going to use an AWS EC2 ARM instance with Ubuntu 20.04(Focal Fossa).

The motivation for this was born in my interest in the new generation of ARM processors and if this is a viable option for the future. Ideally, I do not recommend installing all the necessary packages to compile Xtrabackup in a production environment for security reasons. Still, you can have a “compiling” server for this purpose and then move the binaries around.

Machine Configuration

For this blog post, I picked a c6g.2xlarge instance. The machine has the following hardware configuration:

Multi-writer replication has been a challenge in the MySQL ecosystem for years before truly dedicated solutions were introduced – first Galera (and so Percona XtradDB Cluster (PXC)) replication (around 2011), and then Group Replication (first GA in 2016).

Now, with both multi-writer technologies available, do we still need traditional asynchronous replication, set up in active-active topology? Apparently yes, there are still valid use cases. And you may need it not only when for some reason Galera/PXC or GR are not suitable, but also when you actually use them. Of course, the most typical case is to have a second cluster in a different …

Programming logic is foundational in any application or piece of software. Without it, software wouldn’t really do much of anything. Everything happens off of choice. In the end, some truthy or falsy value is what makes stuff work. For IF/THEN/ELSE logic in standard SQL, there is the CASE expression. There are 2 variations of the CASE Expression: Simple and Searched. In this post, I cover the Simple MySQL CASE expression with example queries…

Image by Nika Akin from …