My first computer program was written almost quarter a century ago on a BK-0010 computer.  It was very simple: the program asked the user to enter their name and then greeted the user using the entered name, like “Hello, Artem!”.  I was fascinated.  A couple of lines written in Vilnius BASIC transformed a piece of metal and silicon into a considerate thing that cared about a person’s name enough to remember it :-).  Of course, the first experience doesn’t represent the day-to-day routine of software development, but the moments when I see a couple of lines making an amazing transformation still enchant me, and remind me why I’ve been writing code all this time.

I’ve just experienced this very same first-time feeling as we’ve released …

Our previous GA release of Percona XtraDB Cluster caused a lot of interest and feedback. I am happy to announce next version Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.23, which comes with bug fixes and improvements.

List of changes:

• Fixes merged from upstream (Codership-mysql)
• Support for MyISAM, now changes to MyISAM tables are replicated to other nodes
• Improvements to XtraBackup SST methods, better error handling
• New SST wsrep_sst_method=skip, useful when you start all nodes from the same sources (i.e. backup)
• Ability to pass list of IP addresses for a new node, it will connect to the first available

Binaries are available from downloads area or from our repositories.

For …

We are excited to have Gerry Narvaja start today at Tokutek! Gerry has spent more than 25 years in the software industry, most of them working with databases for different kinds of applications, from embedded to large-scale web products. Gerry worked first at MySQL, and then Sun Microsystems supporting the Sales teams. In 2008 he transitioned into being a Senior MySQL DBA. Gerry graduated as an Electronic Engineer from I.T.B.A (Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires) and has an M.B.A. from Universidad del Salvador in collaboration with S.U.N.Y.A (State University of NY at Albany).

Gerry enjoys helping users to solve complex database production issues. For almost a year he has been co-hosting the popular MySQL Community podcast, OurSQL, which was given the …

In an earlier blog we've described the general high-level idea of how to achieve 10X better performance for MySQL Cluster 7.2 compared to MySQL Cluster 7.1.

Naturally the development is never as straightforward as the high-level view looks like. In this blog I'll mention a few of the most important roadblocks on the path to improved performance of MySQL Cluster 7.2 that we met and resolved.

Initially when we increased the number of LQH threads from 4 to 16 we only saw scaling to 8 LQH threads and we saw no scaling in going to 16 LQH threads. This was very puzzling since we don't really have any mutexes that should be an issue. However we looked into the mutexes that we had and managed to decrease the number of conflicts on the send mutexes by a factor of 15. This did however not improve performance at all.

Next we noted using oprofile that there was a few functions that for some reason 50% of the CPU time …

Why demos?

For as long as I can remember in my public speaking activities, I have always planned my presentations with some sort of live demo in it. I am always surprised when a conference venue asks me to provide my slides in advance, to be loaded in an anonymous computer with no chance of demos. I always turn down such offers, as I always want to provide a demo.

There have been times when technical or time constraints prevented me from demoing something, and in these cases I felt that the presentation was lacking a vital part. But I always try. I have even given demos during lightning talks, and those were the ones that made me feel really good.

I have given hundreds of presentations, and hundreds of demos, and as in every human activity, I have made plenty of mistakes. I believe I have learned some valuable lesson from my mistakes, and this article is my attempt at sharing the joy with wannabe presenters and also with …

Reddit takes SQL injection very seriously.

How seriously?

Check their headers:

scabral-07890:~ scabral$ curl --head www.reddit.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Set-Cookie: reddit_first=%7B%22organic_pos%22%3A%201%2C%20%22firsttime%22%3A%20%22first%22%7D; Domain=reddit.com; expires=Thu, 31 Dec 2037 23:59:59 GMT; Path=/
Server: '; DROP TABLE servertypes; --
Date: Sat, 12 May 2012 13:54:20 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

scabral-07890:~ scabral$

A colleague at PICC showed me this when he learned of my talk on MySQL security!

Taxonomy of Database Tools

In the MySQL ecosphere there is an ecosystem of tools.  Like real-world ecosystems, the “creatures” in the MySQL tools ecosystem can be classified and organized by a taxonomy.  There are already multiple taxonomies of software bugs (e.g. A Taxonomy of Bugs), but as far as I know this is the first Taxonomy of Database Tools.  A taxonomy of database tools serves useful purposes, as discussed in the previously linked page.  For me, the most useful purpose is the high-level ecosystem view which I use to compare MySQL tools to  …

MySQL is one of the most, if not the most, popular relational databases chosen by internet based startups in the last decade. Although it is a very robust platform and offers many of the necessary features to support the database needs of today’s internet giants, it also suffers from some security issues that must be addressed prior to production use.

This article will discuss the necessary steps to secure a basic MySQL installation and additionally cover more advanced topics for general database security as would be applied to general production environments.

Functionality

The following general statements apply to this security discussion:

•This is a discussion of MySQL as installed on Linux; Windows, OSX, Solaris, and BSD installations may differ and the differences are not covered here.

•MySQL will be handling generic web traffic as is commonly found on PHP, Python, Perl, and …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2011-09-21 through 2012-05-11:

• Understanding Linux CPU Load - when should you be worried?
• Performance Testing - Load Balancer SSL Stress Testing
  This is a great simple test. Thanks, Corey!
• Mosh: the mobile shell
• Twitter open sources its MySQL secret sauce
• Lab Overview
  This guy is serious about his lab!

This week we present how to use pt-archiver and pt-find, two Percona Toolkit tools. We focus on the common usage of the tools and the gotchas we ran into using them.

News/Events/Feedback
Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!

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