Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) are one of the key replication enhancements in MySQL 5.6. GTIDs make it simple to track and compare replication across a master - slave topology. This enables:

- Much simpler recovery from failures of the master,

- Introduces great flexibility in the provisioning and on-going management of multi-tier or ring (circular) replication topologies.

A new on-demand MySQL 5.6 GTID webinar delivered by the replication engineering team is now available, providing deep insight into the design and implementation of GTIDs, and how they enable users to simplify MySQL scaling and HA. The webinar covers:

- Concepts: What is a GTID? How does the …

In On learning InnoDB: A journey to the core, I introduced the innodb_diagrams project to document the InnoDB internals, which provides the diagrams used in this post. (Note that each image below is linked to a higher resolution version of the same image.)

The basic structure of the space and each page was described in The basics of InnoDB space file layout, and we’ll now take a deeper look into how INDEX pages are physically structured. This will lay the ground work to discuss indexes at a logical (and much higher) level.

Everything is an index in InnoDB

Before diving into physical structures, it’s critical to understand that in InnoDB, …

I’ve written a lot about modeling MySQL with the USL, and I like it best of all the scalability models I’ve seen, but it’s not the only way to think about scalability. I was aware that New Relic supports a scalability chart, so I decided to take a peek at that. Here’s a screenshot of the chart, from their blog:

Here’s how it works. It plots response time (or database time, or CPU) as the dependent variable, versus throughput as the independent variable. There’s a line through it to indicate the general shape. Samples are charted as points in a scatter plot. The points are color-coded by the time of day. Outliers are automatically removed.

The focus on response time is really good. That’s one of the things I like about New Relic. While most systems show people status counters, and imply …

It is a new year and it's time again to start thinking of all the great people and companies that make the MySQL ecosystem so great. It is time to start thinking of this year's MySQL Community Awards.

Last year we had a record number of winners, eleven goblets were handed out! But behind the scenes things were even more exciting, there were several ties that forced the panel to do extra tie-breaking voting rounds. In one category we even had a 6-way tie! All of this just testifies to how much is happening in the MySQL world nowadays.

read more

This is a response to a blog postby analyst and marketing consultant Curt Monash.

Originally virtualization meant running one operating system in a window inside of another operating system, e.g. running a Linux on a Windows machine using Microsoft Virtual PC or VMWare. Then virtualization evolved to mean slicing a single server into many for more granular resource allocation (Curt’s ex uno plures, translated: out of one, many). It has since expanded to include e pluribus unum (from many, one) and e pluribus ad pluribus (from many to many). This is evidenced in the use of the term “virtualization” to create the compound words: server virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization and now database virtualization.

Server Virtualization: Abstracts the physical …

This is a response to a blog postby analyst and marketing consultant Curt Monash.

Originally virtualization meant running one operating system in a window inside of another operating system, e.g. running a Linux on a Windows machine using Microsoft Virtual PC or VMWare. Then virtualization evolved to mean slicing a single server into many for more granular resource allocation (Curt’s ex uno plures, translated: out of one, many). It has since expanded to include e pluribus unum (from many, one) and e pluribus ad pluribus (from many to many). This is evidenced in the use of the term “virtualization” to create the compound words: server virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization and now database virtualization.

Server Virtualization: Abstracts the physical (servers), presenting it as a …

I recently discovered the sync_binlog, sync_relay_log, sync_master_info, and sync_relay_log_info system variables in MySQL, and am using them to make my MySQL replication more crash safe.

Here's the problem that inspired me to make this change.

It started when one of our passive MySQL master database hosts restarted unexpectedly. The host came back up fairly quickly, and MySQL started up cleanly once InnoDB finished its crash recovery.

…

I recently discovered the sync_binlog, sync_relay_log, sync_master_info, and sync_relay_log_info system variables in MySQL, and am using them to make my MySQL replication more crash safe.

Here's the problem that inspired me to make this change.

It started when one of our passive MySQL master database hosts restarted unexpectedly. The host came back up fairly quickly, and MySQL started up cleanly once InnoDB finished its crash recovery.

…

I recently discovered the sync_binlog, sync_relay_log, sync_master_info, and sync_relay_log_info system variables in MySQL, and am using them to make my MySQL replication more crash safe.

Here's the problem that inspired me to make this change.

It started when one of our passive MySQL master database hosts restarted unexpectedly. The host came back up fairly quickly, and MySQL started up cleanly once InnoDB finished its crash recovery.

…

On January 16th at 10 AM Pacific/1 PM Eastern, I will give a webinar about the main traps that are awaiting you when designing and building a stable and high-performance MySQL application.

I will discuss a broad range of topics, from hardware and backups to instrumentation and indexing. I often see during my consulting practice wrong configuration putting data at risk or huge wastes of money to buy powerful hardware where a few indexes could have done the same result.

So if you think your MySQL servers are not in an optimal state, I invite you to sign up on this page (follow the “Register” link).

See you next week!

The post Webinar: Avoiding common traps when …