This is a great beginner guide. I was tasked with installing mysql and importing a dump file of another mysql database. I managed to get it installed, but couldn’t connect to it. Thanks to you I got connected, learned my way around and I’m going to import a dump file.

I really like the percona toolkit, we all love the percona toolkit.
I know how it’s difficult to write operational and efficient scripts (I try to do that myself everyday)
And it is even more difficult to share a script, to take the responsibility to share its own code.
From there, understand that this article is simply a review of my own thoughts about pt-archiver (with the invaluable assistance of @maximefouilleul), I don’t want to question the quality or usefulness of this tool.

I tried pt-archiver for the first time this week, and the first thing I do before using a tool is read the documentation (yes, I really like to read documentations)

I was intrigued by some options of this tool, first, I can read “It deletes data from the source by default“.
Personally, I hate that you want to remove my data by default, I prefer to have a –delete option …

Given that most people don’t know what the cloud is, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that most people can’t articulate the benefits of cloud computing clearly. I commonly hear “Scalability!” “Easy provisioning!” “Flexibility!” and so on. Of course, all of these are benefits you can get without the cloud. Theo says it pretty well, so I won’t belabor that point.

What do you think are the benefits of cloud computing?

In the end I can think of only one really unique benefit, and it’s indirect. It is this: the rise of cloud computing is creating a social phenomenon among engineers. The benefit isn’t the technology, or the economics, or any of that stuff. It’s the change …

I recently found an interesting tool to play with databases, SQLFiddle.

The tool is used to share some fragments of code, running on a live database, to allow users to not only see (read) the code, but also actually execute it, to play with the code.

See this link for all the details.

The nice part is that MySQL 5.5 is part of the supported databases, try it here.

It gets better: MySQL 5.6 is also there, so you get to try new 5.6 features, or your favorite query, in a blink, without having to do an installation.

And icing on the 5.6 cake, the PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA is also enabled, with grants given to the user to query performance schema tables. …

Tokutek sponsored the Percona Live MySQL / New York 2012 Conference which took place this past Monday and Tuesday.  I spent much of the time at our booth discussing TokuDB with conference attendees but also managed to attend the following presentations:

• Understanding Performance through Measurement, Benchmarking and Profiling by Rene Cannao of PalominoDB.  Rene presented 3 hours of content covering his methodologies, toolbox, and tips & tricks to help identify performance bottlenecks. Rene has obviously been optimizing systems for some time as I’ve never seen such a comprehensive list of tools and techniques.  This …

Overview
MySQL replication does not always scale up well. A common reason for
that is the single-threaded nature of the slave server applier.
Indeed the performance race between the master and the slave
has been unfair. Contrary to the master, which executes transactions
concurrently by multiple threads, the standard MySQL slave is limited
to install changes sequentially by the only thread.
However, if logical partitioning of data per database
takes place, the 5.6 server's Multi-Threaded Slave (MTS) framework may
be found helpful. It allows to install changes done to different
databases in parallel.
For instance the simplest use case would be when the master server has
just two databases and transactions against the master server update
only one of them at a time. Those transactions when replicated will
be executed by two separate slave worker …

There's definitely more and more buzz on and around cloud computing and different solutions to support it nowadays!

This was evident while visiting LinuxCon/CloudOpen in San Diego a few weeks ago, where I spoke about high availability solutions for MySQL. Most cloud sessions were highly attended, and I could sense an excitement in the air with regards to the cloud. It was also evident, however, that there is only a small percentage of people today truly taking advantage of the cloud. It seems that despite all the excitement, there is a large portion of potential users who don't know how to use the cloud, or what the benefits and potential drawbacks are.

read more

This second day at the Oracle Open World is hotter than the previous one! Today, we focused on Oracle Linux. Oracle Linux roadmap, the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) release 3 is coming in summer 2013. Oracle's strategy consists of developing the new enterprise-class kernel on state of the art hardware, which guarantees to customer to get the most of their hardware (Like Suse for SLES 11).

The Oracle Linux development team is working on many topics. But before, we will review what changed with Oracle Linux 6.x:

• Oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall RPM is a replacement for "oracle-validated". This RPM aids in the installation of the Oracle Database.
• The package manager (yum) has been improved with several features like patching your kernel with only CVE updates for fixing security leaks
• BTRFS as root file system

In combination with the right yum command, you can install kernel …

As Todd Farmer points out in Understanding mysql_config_editors security aspects, the new .mylogin.cnf file generated by mysql_config_editor does not securely store the password used to login to the database. It just obfuscates it.

The format of the file is as follows (as of MySQL 5.6.7-RC):

• 4 Bytes Zero (Version Information)
• 20 Bytes Key Generation Matter
• Repeated:
  • 4 Bytes Length information
  • Length bytes crypted matter. The crypt is done using the AES ENCRYPT function, which in itself is insecure: It is an aes-128-ecb with a NULL IV.
  …

At MySQL Connect last weekend the MySQL 5.6 was released as a Release Candidate. It contains a large set of improvements over MySQL 5.5. In this blog I will focus on what has changed in the area of scalability.

There are four main areas of improvement of scalability in the MySQL 5.6:
1) Splitting InnoDB Kernel mutex
2) The G5 discovery
3) Splitting LOCK_open mutex
4) Binlog group commit

In InnoDB as in so many other products there was an infamous kernel mutex. This mutex was a sort of catch all mutex used to protect the system from concurrent use of various data structures. For an implementer it was easy enough to use the kernel mutex as a way to achieve safe concurrency. The problem of course is that it hurts our scalability. The kernel mutex was a major bottleneck in many benchmarks, and even more important it also made it very difficult to resolve other scalability issues.

…