After the GitHub MySQL Failover incident a lot of blogs/people have explained that fully automated failover might not be the most optimal solution.

Fully automated failover is indeed dangerous, and should  be avoided if possible. But a complete manual failover is also dangerous. A fully automated manually triggered failover is probably a better solution.

A synchronous replication solution is also not a complete solution. A split-brain situation is a good example of a failure which could happen. Of course most clusters have all kinds of safe guard to prevent that, but unfortunately also safe guards can fail.

Every failover/cluster should be considered broken unless:

1. You've tested the failover scripts and procedures
2. You've tested the failover scripts and procedures under normal load
3. You've tested the failover scripts and procedures under high load
…

Not so far ago Fusion-io announced SDK which provides direct API access to Fusion ioMemory(tm) in addition to providing a native filesystem (directFS) with a goal to avoid overhead from kernel and regular Linux filesystems: ext4 and xfs. Fusion-io will explain these features during our Percona Live New York conference and share performance numbers.

It is not too late to register for conference and talk with Fusion-io engineers directly. “PerconaNY” registration will give you 15% discount.

While putting PostgreSQL 9.2 through it’s paces, I noticed some behavior that was eerily familiar. Back in January of 2006, Peter Zaitsev opened a bug against MySQL 4.1 that complained of a comparison of an out-of-range constant triggering a key lookup (later distilled to a feature request to “statically evaluate predicates using implicit type constraints”). [...]

Configuring Your LEMP System (Linux, nginx, MySQL, PHP-FPM) For Maximum Performance

If you are using nginx as your webserver, you are looking for a performance boost and better speed. nginx is fast by default, but you can optimize its performance and the performance of all parts (like PHP and MySQL) that work together with nginx. Here is a small, incomprehensive list of tips and tricks to configure your LEMP system (Linux, nginx, MySQL, PHP-FPM) for maximum performance. These tricks work for me, but your mileage may vary. Do not implement them all at once, but one by one and check what effect the modification has on your system's performance.

Every time I have had the pleasure of attending Oracle Open World, I have discovered a plethora of technical heavy-weights from all over the world in attendance. I enjoy meeting and shmoozing with these people almost as much as absorbing the technical content of the show itself. Many of my Pythian colleagues are presenting at [...]

I will be hosting a Birds of a Feather Session at MySQL Connect on Saturday, Sep 29, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM – Hilton San Francisco – Golden Gate 8. This is an open discussion with you about what you would like to see from the MySQL Community Team, MySQL, and Oracle in the future. After it concludes, we can hit the Community Reception.

The original description of the Community BOF as provided to the Content Committee.

Come meet with the MySQL Community Team for a discussion about MySQL and the MySQL Community. This is an open session, so you can make suggestions, ask the questions you are having trouble getting answered, provide feedback, network, and help direct where the future of the MySQL Community will go. You will be able to interact with the Community Team on everything from contributions to downloads. How can we best support …

Just a reminder that Wednesday the 26th at 10am Pacific time, I’ll give a webinar on PRM, the Percona replication manager. During the webinar, I’ll walk you through the setup of a PRM cluster and show you how to perform some basic management tasks. If you are interested, click here to register.

See you Wednesday!

Regards,

Yves

Did you know there is a book specifically addressing how to use MySQLdb? MySQL for Python was published by Packt Publishing in September 2010. If you're worried about two years being an eternity on the internet, don't: There hasn't been a new release of MySQLdb since the book was published.

Speaking of new releases, I built a Windows installer of MySQLdb-1.2.3 for Python-2.7 and using the MySQL Connector/C 6.0. This should be able to connect to any modern version of MySQL (4.0 through 5.5 and newer), and as I understand it, it should also work with MariaDB, but this is not yet tested.

Additionally, there is a 1.2.4 release coming out in the near future which will be a bug-fix …

Following my previous blog post focusing on InnoDB talks at MySQL Connect, let us review today the sessions focusing on the MySQL Optimizer:

• Saturday, 11.30 am, Room Golden Gate 6:

MySQL Optimizer Overview—Olav Sanstå, Oracle

The goal of MySQL optimizer is to take a SQL query as input and produce an optimal execution plan for the query. This session presents an overview of the main phases of the MySQL optimizer and the primary optimizations done to the query. These optimizations are based on a combination of logical transformations and cost-based decisions. Examples of optimization strategies the presentation covers are the main query transformations, the join optimizer, the data access selection …

Computing Security Magazine has nominated GreenSQL in the Computing Security Awards and we need your votes to win.

GreenSQL, the Database Security Company, delivers out-of-the-box database security solutions for small and mid-sized organizations. Started as an open source project back in 2006, GreenSQL became the no. 1 database security solution for MySQL with 100,000 users worldwide and launched a commercial version in 2009.

Please vote for GreenSQL in the “Content Security Solution of the Year” category on the voting page! 

Thank you for your help!