Read the original article at Upcoming for Scalable Startups

Just back from the Labor Day holiday, and ready to dive back in.

I thought this would be a great time to outline some of our upcoming topics so here goes…

1. Why Oracle usability sucks

- a rant about Oracle’s weak points

In the meantime take a peek at our piece on why we wrote the book on Oracle & Open Source. We ruminate on trends in the datacenter and take a stab at Oracle’s future.

2. Why relational databases don’t scale

- Is there any such thing as automatic scalability?
- What blocks scalability?
- Are NoSQL databases magic?

Also one of our articles that went viral – …

So, the MySQL Configuration Wizard for making MySQL Easier to use on Windows will just plainly aid in setting up a safe and sound MySQL Configuration. Right? Just run it and you are safe. OK? But thing do break, specifically harddrives and stuff, so to keep your database in shape you have a second set of disks in your Windows machine, for all that data that you do not want to loose in RAID configuration. Or you might even connect, say, your D:-drive to an expensive but safe SAN! Then you run the MySQL Configuration Wizard and tell it to place your InnoDB data files in that D: drive. Phew! Now you are OK! That RAID-set was expensive, but better safe than sorry! Now you can place all that important data into MySQL, and what's left on the C:-drive is just some programs, which can be replaced if necessary, but the data is safe!

NO! That's NOT how it works, not at all. There are two things wrong here:

…

On the lighter side: I’ve always had trouble with mysqldump’s expected syntax. You know, as the author of a book and all that, you might think I can get this to work. But pretty much every time I run this tool, it humiliates me. Witness:

$ mysqldump --host localhost --password secr3t --all-databases
Usage: mysqldump [OPTIONS] database [tables]
OR     mysqldump [OPTIONS] --databases [OPTIONS] DB1 [DB2 DB3...]
OR     mysqldump [OPTIONS] --all-databases [OPTIONS]
For more options, use mysqldump --help

Alas.

Further Reading:

• A review of SecoBackup Amazon S3 backups for MySQL
• Introducing MySQL Parallel Restore
• …

After a long pause in the speaking game, I am back.

It's since April that I haven't been on stage, and it is now time to resume my public duties.

• I will speak at MySQL Connect in San Francisco, just at the start of Oracle Open World, with a talk on MySQL High Availability: Power and Usability. It is about the cool technology that is keeping me busy here at Continuent, which can make life really easy for DBAs. This talk will be a demo fest. If you are attending MySQL Connect, you should see it!
• A happy return for me. On October 27th I will talk about open source databases and the pleasures of command line operations at …

It is public news now that Continuent has three new hires. I am particularly pleased with the news, as we are improving the team in three different directions:

• Services and management, with Ronald Bradford, with whom we have crossed paths several times, first in the MySQL community activities, then as colleagues at MySQL AB, and again in community cyberspace.
• Development, with Ludovic Launer, a senior developer with a long experience in development and software architecture. This is an excellent injection of new blood for our development team.
• Sales, with Robert Noyes, who has worked in enterprise sales for 25 years, and comes at the right moment to reinforce our business in the moment of its biggest growth that I have seen …

This month I have joined the team at Continuent. No stranger to the MySQL ecosystem, Continuent provides replication and clustering technology for managing data between MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Vertica and a growing list of data stores.

I have known many of the team at Continuent for some time, and will again be joining Giuseppe Maxia from our days at MySQL Inc/AB starting back in 2006.

I am looking forward to taking the hard work out of administration of MySQL systems with the simplicity of Continuent Tungsten, simplifying tasks including automatic failover, multi-master and geo cluster redundancy to a single command.

Catch me speaking at the upcoming MySQL Connect (San Francisco) and …

We are proud to announce the recent addition of three new team members: 

Ronald Bradford, Senior Engineer, has 24 years of professional RDBMS experience covering Ingres, Oracle and MySQL. His primary focus is with architecture, performance, scalability and business continuity of traditional and cloud-based deployments. Ronald is the author of 4 books on MySQL, a MySQL

A big welcome to the China MySQL Community.  We have just launched the Chinese MySQL Planet.  Zhaoyang Jian (an Oracle Ace Director) has started us off with his blogs so please feel free to submit your Chinese Feeds.

In this blog post I will show you how to setup a replication from MySQL Cluster  (ndbcluster) to a regular MySQL Server (InnoDB). If you want to understand the concepts, check out part 7 of our free MySQL Cluster training.

First of all we start with a MySQL Cluster looking like this, and what we want to do is to setup replication server to the Reporting Server (InnoDB slave).




MySQL Cluster is great at scaling large numbers of write transactions or shorter key-based read querise, but not so good at longer reporting or analytical queries. I generally recommend people to limit analytical/reporting queries on the MySQL Cluster, in order to avoid slowing down the …

MySQL Replication is useful and easy to setup. It is used for very different purposes. For example:

• split read and writes
• run data mining or reporting processes on them
• disaster recovery

Is important to mention that a replication server is not a backup by itself. A mistake on the master, for example a DROP DATABASE or an UPDATE without a WHERE clause will be replicated nearly instantly to all slave servers and just having a slave is not going to be helpful here. How can we avoid that kind of mistakes? Having a slave server lagging behind.

pt-slave-delay

pt-slave-delay is another tool that comes with Percona Toolkit and it is very easy to use. It works stopping and starting the SQL Thread in order to …