Well, it happened again…  Another lengthy EBS outage in the US-East region impacted several sites across the net.  While failures like this are rare, they can be quite costly and translate into headaches for the operations team when impact production systems for any length of time.  At Percona, we routinely help clients architect and deploy highly available systems designed with disaster recovery in the cloud.  Here are a few high level best practices that I’ve seen when helping clients with AWS deployments:

1. Plan for failure
2. Plan for failure
3. Plan for … you get the idea

Plan for Failure

The single most critical piece is to plan for and expect failure.  The ease of setting an infrastructure in the cloud combined …

I’ve been browsing some mailing lists and so on (it doesn’t matter which ones) and came across the Great 32-Bit Debate afresh. The debate always starts with someone saying “I need 32-bit support” or “this doesn’t work on 32-bit systems,” and someone else raising an objection to that, saying that nobody uses 32-bit systems anymore and anyone who does is doing something wrong.

Why would anyone use a 32-bit OS in the year 2012? I can think of a few very good reasons.

1. The universe isn’t wholly x86_64 yet; there’s still ARM and other non-server systems.
2. Developer laptops often run 32-bit operating systems, especially when Linux is the developer’s preference, because it works better with a lot of proprietary software such as Flash and audio drivers, and generally causes a lot less user headache. This is especially relevant because Ubuntu, Fedora, and other popular distributions are targeted towards …

A Pattern for a Newly Hired DBA? I don’t think this experience is unique. It has been shared repeatedly among those starting a job as a DBA (database administrator) at a new company, especially when the organization has never had a dedicated DBA. The conversation usually goes something like this: – “Welcome aboard <insert name here>! Here [...] …

Choosing a Next-Gen Database: The new world order of NoSQL, NewSQL & MySQL Tuesday, November 13, 2012, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST

The database market is becoming increasingly complex and is changing on an almost daily basis.  Matt Aslett is the Research Manager for Data Management and Analytics at 451 Research.  He has overall responsibility for the coverage [...] Read More

Background: SkySQL is a distributed company. Nearly all of us work from home. To be productive, we need to emulate the best aspects of collaborating as if we were working next to one another. Given that nearly all of us had worked under similar distributed conditions at MySQL AB, we knew what we were getting into when we were founded. Obviously, we wanted to learn from our past experiences when making our choices for tools and processes.

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I’m pleased to announce special bundled hotel/conference pass packages for the Percona Live London MySQL Conference which is December 3-4, 2012 at The Millennium Gloucester Conference Centre in London. The conference features tutorials December 3rd and breakout sessions December 4th. A networking reception will follow the Tuesday sessions.

Four special, money-saving bundles are available, whether you will attend the conference alone or will attend the conference with a colleague and share a hotel room. As a bonus, all of the conference hotel packages include a hot English breakfast and in-room Internet access!

– One conference only pass and one single occupancy hotel night for £425
– One conference plus tutorials pass and two single …

Yesterday we (Gerry, Lars, Serg) had a mini-MySQL’er reunion courtesy of us all speaking at HighLoad++. Much thanks to the organizers for bringing us out here so that we could all catch up :)

We had a chat about how SHOW CONTRIBUTORS got into the code of MySQL as we were giving ideas to HighLoad++ organizers to raise money for charity. I distinctively remember it had something to do with a charity auction at one of the older MySQL User Conferences in Santa Clara. This was when we had quiz shows! And it was at the UC in 2006 for a charity auction where all proceeds got donated to the EFF. 

I see than Ronald has it in a …

MySQL Notifier is a quick tool for Windows installations to help you manage your instances.

MySQL Notifier allows quick access to MySQL Instances running on a Windows machine in a handy fashion.

It provides a quick way to start, stop or restart your Windows based instances. It also provides easy access to MySQL Workbench (if you have Workbench installed) for system admin, queries, and configuration. It can also call a window for the MySQL Utilities Shell.

A quick way to start, stop, or restart MySQL Instances.

It will ‘discover’ new MySQL services on your Windows system and add them to the tray.

MySQL …

This article is following the previously published investigation about I/O limitations on Linux and also sharing my data from the steps in investigation of MySQL/InnoDB I/O limitations within RW workloads..

So far, I've got in my hands a server with a Fusion-io card and I'm expecting now to analyze more in details the limits we're hitting within MySQL and InnoDB on heavy Read+Write workloads. As the I/O limit from the HW level should be way far due outstanding Fusion-io card performance, contentions within MySQL/InnoDB code should be much more better visible now (at least I'm expecting ;-))

But before to deploy on it any of MySQL test workloads, I want to understand the I/O limits I'm hitting on the lower levels (if any) - first on the card itself, and then on the filesystem levels..

NOTE …

Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 12.10 (LAMP)

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an Ubuntu 12.10 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.