It is not a secret that we’ve been kicking the tires and playing with JIRA for project management. After using it since the beginning of the year most of us like the feel of it and we’ve decided that it makes sense to start using it more.

As you know, the MariaDB project has many fragmented resources. We report bugs in Launchpad. We store our plans in worklog. We’ve never used the Launchpad Blueprint feature for this very reason. We don’t use Launchpad Answers because we have the Knowledgebase.

With this move to hosted JIRA (yes, this is an important link: …

I have a customer who is considering Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a two colo WAN environment.  They wanted me to do a test comparing PXC against semi-synchronous replication to see how they stack up against each other.

Test Environment

The test environment included AWS EC2 nodes in US-East and US-West (Oregon).  The ping RTT latency between these nodes was right around 100ms.

All environments used Percona Server or Percona XtraDB Cluster server 5.5.24.  Innodb durability was disabled for all tests (innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2).  All other settings were the same kept the same unless otherwise noted.

I tested against the following setups:

Control

The control …

Dan Berry and Heather Sullivan discuss how Constant Contact architected their replication strategy. Recorded at  SkySQL & MariaDB: Solutions Day for the MySQL® Database.

Robert Hodges & Giuseppe Maxia of Continuent present this talk on Tungsten. Continuent Tungsten's architecture makes creating complex topologies, such as multi-master, really easy and allows for outstanding performance using parallel replication and pre-fetching. Users of this technology can deal with their clusters as if they were a single server, thanks to the transparent connectivity that

Read the original article at RDS or MySQL – Ten Use Cases

Amazon’s Relational Database Service is based on MySQL under the hood.  So many colleagues and clients ask me – should I go with RDS or MySQL? As with every technology question, the answer is – it depends.

Here are some scenarios to help you decide.

1. I’m replicating into Amazon from a physical datacenter

A: This setup is common if you’re using Amazon’s VPC or Virtual Private Cloud.  With a router dropped into your datacenter, VPC allows you to extend and spinup virtual instances from Amazon as if they’re sitting in your own existing datacenter.  Great stuff, but you won’t be able to replicate from your existing master MySQL instance to cloud Amazon RDS instances.  To do that, roll your own with MySQL 5.5 or Percona …

As ones data model evolves changing the database schema becomes painful, especially for big databases where the table must be taken offline. Fortunately, Tokutek introduced online schema changes starting in TokuDB v5.0.

A typical schema change involves adding or deleting a column from a table. These operations usually require the table to be rebuilt offline since the row format is different. In contrast to other storage engines however, column addition or deletion with TokuDB just inserts a broadcast update message into the fractal tree data structure, rather than rebuilding the table. This message defers changing rows from the old format to the new format and is executed after the alter table operation is long gone. The trick is to allow the storage engine to determine that the column addition or deletion does not require a …

OK, the query cache is a pretty smart idea, right? When the same query is executed many times by many threads, and the data in the relevant tables isn't touched so the query cache is invalidated, then the query cache is a pretty good idea, right? And even when not used, it really shouldn't be in the way, right? It's in memory after all, so a check for a query in the cache should be quick, right?

Maybe, but far from always, and fact is that the query cache is becoming less and less useful. Let me tell you why. We have more and more memory in our machines, and disk is less used for storage, and more for persistence. Even though the size of our databases we process is getting bigger and bigger, the data we actually access isn't growing that much, or in other words, we keep storing more and more historical data, for a number of reasons.

At the same time as the amount of RAM we have access to, we do not get …

According to a recent survey conducted by The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., 85 percent of small business owners believe a data breach is unlikely.

However, small business owners acknowledge the negative business impact of a possible data breach – nearly two-thirds of business owners (61 percent) believe a data breach violates trust and would jeopardize their relationships with customers, patients and employees. More than a third (38 percent) say they have a more negative opinion of companies that have recently experienced a breach, based on the companies’ handling of the breach.

The survey also indicated that about a third of business owners (34 percent) say they would have difficulty complying with government notification requirements (although they may be obliged to in the near …

Some years ago, in 2009, I wrote a couple of blog posts on the subject of Character sets and UNICODE and how that works. In a not unusual move, I included a bit on the history of character sets and stuff like that. And another recurring theme was that I promised a third part on collations, something that somehow didn't really happen. You can read these posts here and here.

Now, 3 years later, we expect things to have moved on. But not really. Except that UTF-8 is much more …

Recently I started using Checkmarkable - a free online service to make and use checklists. Here’s how it works:

- You make a checklist, which is a template
- When someone wants to use the checklist, they create a “worksheet”.

That’s it! There are great features, such as being able to do steps out of order, and being able to flag a step while you’re working on it. I’ve used this for a few weeks now and it’s great for the processes that I need to make sure I do all the steps in. It’s very easy to use and edit the steps if needed.

If you want to see how it works, I have created a checklist (based on a PalominoDB blog post from a while back, which I cannot find to actually link to) for how to change the slaves in a MySQL master/master + slaves configuration to slave off the other master in the topology. …