“For analytical things, eventual consistency is ok (as long as you can know after you have run them if they were consistent or not). For real world involving money or resources it’s not necessarily the case.” — Michael “Monty” Widenius. In a recent interview, I asked Justin Sheehy, Chief Technology Officer at Basho Technologies, maker [...]

“For analytical things, eventual consistency is ok (as long as you can know after you have run them if they were consistent or not). For real world involving money or resources it’s not necessarily the case.” — Michael “Monty” Widenius. In a recent interview, I asked Justin Sheehy, Chief Technology Officer at Basho Technologies, maker [...]

Hot backups are important for high availability, they can run without blocking the application. Percona Xtrabackup is a great tool for backing up InnoDB data. 
We have created a backup tool called s9s_backup that makes Xtrabackup really easy to use, and is fully integrated with ClusterControl, which means that you can schedule backups with ease and view the backups that you have taken, and also restore the backups with no pain.

s9s_backup is available in the lastest version of ClusterControl or you can download it here.

Is mysqldump totally useless then?

No. If you would like to isolate and load only one table, mysqldump is great, or if you want to …

I have been asked many times to provide an easy way of deploying fan-in and star schema replication schemas. So far, I have been delayed by more pressing duties.

Now the time has come. Since we are about to release a new version of Tungsten Replicator, I made the effort of putting together the steps for an easy deployment.

Recipes

The package (with downloads and svn code available at Tungsten-Replicator Toolbox) includes some juicy goodies. There are recipes to install.

• Master/slave, the classic replication topology. Nothing fancy, but with the tools mentioned in the next section, it becomes as valuable as the other topologies.
• All-masters. This is the Tungsten no-SPOF topology. Every node is a master, and every node has a …

How do you connect to and converse with your database of choice (MySQL, in my case)? Chances are it’s largely formed by the programming language you choose. I’ve worked with a variety of programming languages. Anytime I begin learning a new one, I am reminded again that there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Over the last few years, I’ve mostly programmed in Perl and shell. The shell interface to MySQL is simple: the mysql command-line tool. There is not much to think about. In Perl, however, the standard is to use DBI. I have grown accustomed to DBI over the years, but that doesn’t mean I like it. I think it’s one of the worst database APIs I’ve seen. The abstractions it uses (there are only two object abstractions: connections and “statement handles”) are awkward to the extreme.

It does get worse, though. PHP historically used libmysql’s C library for connecting to MySQL, and similarly used native …

At tomorrow’s NoVA MySQL October Meetup, I will give a talk: “Fractal Tree Indexes – Theoretical Overview and Customer Use Cases.” The meetup is 7 pm Tuesday, October 23, 2012, and will be held at AOL Campus HQ in Dulles VA.

Most databases employ B-trees to achieve a good tradeoff between the ability to update data quickly and to search it quickly. It turns out that B-trees are far from the optimum in this tradeoff space. This led to the development at MIT, Rutgers and Stony Brook of Fractal Tree® indexes. Fractal Tree indexes improve MySQL® scalability and query performance by allowing greater insertion rates, supporting rich indexing and offering efficient compression. They can also eliminate operational headaches such as …

I was asked about slides for my talks at Northeast PHP, so I figured I would post them here so folks could benefit. I gave three MySQL talks. In the list below, the talk name links to the description on the conference website, and you can get the slides by clicking the “PDF slides” links.
Are You Getting the Best Out of Your MySQL Indexes – PDF slides
Getting Rid of Scheduled Tasks Using MySQL Events – PDF slides
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The first Development Milestone and Early Access releases of MySQL Cluster 7.3 were announced just several weeks ago. To provide more detail and demonstrate the new features, Andrew Morgan and I will be hosting a live webinar this coming Thursday 25th October at 0900 Pacific Time / 16.00 UTC

Even if you can't make the live webinar, it is still worth registering for the event as you will receive a notification when the replay will be available, to view on-demand at your convenience

In the webinar, we will discuss the enhancements being previewed as part of MySQL Cluster …

Join companies in the web, gaming, telecoms and mobile areas by learning about MySQL Cluster's distributed, shared-nothing, real-time design.

The 3 days, MySQL Cluster course teaches you how to configure and manage the cluster nodes to ensure high availability. Learn how to install different nodes and understand cluster internals. Here is a sample of some events on the schedule for this course:

My students wanted an example of how to use a lookup table in the database. I thought it would be a great idea to create a simple example like this one.

A lookup table is a generalization that holds lists of values that support end-user selections. The following example uses a combination of the common_lookup_table and common_lookup_column columns to identify sets of value for drop down lists. The end-user selects a value from the list to identify a unique row, and returns a common_lookup_id surrogate key value.

The sample code uses the table defined in the previous illustration. It uses a simple HTML drop down list, a PHP library.inc file, and an HTML display form. Below is the drop down selection set for a table and column value.

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