I’ve used the Bazaar (bzr) version control system since roughly 2005. The focus on usability was fantastic and the team at Canonical managed to get the entire MySQL BitKeeper history into Bazaar – facilitating the switch from BitKeeper to Bazaar.

There were some things that weren’t so great. Early on when we were looking at Bazaar for MySQL it was certainly not the fastest thing when it came to dealing with a repository as large as MySQL. Doing an initial branch over the internet was painful and a much worse experience than BitKeeper was. The work-around that we all ended up using was downloading a tarball of a recent Bazaar repository and then “bzr pull” to get the latest. This was much quicker than letting bzr just do it. Performance for initial branch improved a lot since then, but even today it’s still not great – …

• Fact: MySQL 5.6 was released as GA in February 2013
• Fact: MySQL 5.6 has been available with its complete set of features since September 2012
• Fact: On September 21st, Oracle has released MySQL 5.7.2, which is the de facto major release after MySQL 5.6 (5.7.1 was just a token “we’re-still-in-business” release).
• Fact: As of today, there is no GA-ready fork of MySQL 5.6.

Percona Server is still in RC state, while MariaDB, with its runaway version 10, is still in alpha state. Of these releases, Percona Server seems the one in the better shape. Their problem was to adapt Percona Server to the enhanced codebase for 5.6, and the merging problems were bigger than the ones encountered in 5.1 and 5.5. Percona Server is a business oriented fork. It includes specific features for …

Two of the more popular solutions are  MySQL Master HA and Percona Replication Manager.

MySQL Master HA

MHA is based on a set of Perl scripts that monitors for replication and server health. When a failover scenario will happen, it can do automatic failover to a slave OR from a selection of slaves you have configured to make as the new master. The good thing about this is, after the initial failover, there will be no succeeding attempts to fail back, this is to protect your data and consistency of the cluster. You can also configure to only have manual failover for scheduled maintenance and the like. Between PRM and MHA, MHA is really easier to manage.

http://code.google.com/p/mysql-master-ha/

Percona Replication Manager

PRM is based on …

I grabbed all the tests introduced in MariaDB 5.5.32 (i.e. “bzr diff -rtag:mariadb-5.5.31..mariadb-5.5.32 mysql-test/” and some foo) and threw them in their own test file. I only kept tests for crashing bugs and ignored those that required plugins (there were two or three, but nothing major). So now I have a test file that should crash MariaDB 5.5.31 and probably before. But, the question is: does this crash Percona Server or MySQL?

While it is excellent to see the MariaDB guys including tests for their crashing bugs, are these MariaDB specific or do they affect other MySQL flavours?

I built a release build of top of trunk Percona Server and ran the test against it. I got no crashes. In a debug build, I got two. One was to do with REPAIR on an ARCHIVE table and the other was “SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(STR_TO_DATE(’2020′,’%Y’));”. I found the same thing for a debug build of top of tree MySQL.

All the other tests …

One of my favorite MySQL tools ever is pt-query-digest. It's the tool you use to generate a report of your slow query log (or some other supported sources), and is similar to for example the Query Analyzer in MySQL Enterprise Monitor. Especially in the kind of job I am, where I often just land out of nowhere on a server at the customer site, and need to quickly get an overview of what is going on, this tool is always the first one I run. I will show some examples below.

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Today, just like many times before, I needed to configure a monitoring server for MySQL using Cacti and awesome Percona Monitoring Templates. The only difference was that this time I wanted to get it to run with 1 min resolution (using ganglia and graphite, both with 10 sec resolution, for all the rest of our monitoring in Swiftype really spoiled me!). And that’s where the usual pain in the ass Cacti configuration gets really amplified by the million things you need to change to make it work. So, this is a short checklist post for those who need to configure a Cacti server with 1 minute resolution and setup Percona Monitoring Plugins on it.

Configuring Cacti for 60-seconds polling

First of all, we need to take a Cacti server, which by default is configured to do polling …

Lately more people ask me for comparisons between Percona Server & MariaDB. There isn’t a definitive blow-by-blow feature comparison yet, but it’ll come soon.

All that said, its great to see new features from MariaDB make it into Percona Server. The features that I’ve managed to track: group commit for the binary log, threadpool and atomic write support for Fusion-io devices.

It started with the group commit for the binary log feature in Percona Server 5.5.18-23.0 ( …

Following are benchmark results comparing Tokutek TokuDB and Percona XtraDB at scale factor 10 on the Star Schema benchmark. I’m posting this on the Shard-Query blog because I am going to compare the performance of Shard-Query on the benchmark on these two engines. First, however, I think it is important to see how they perform in isolation without concurrency.

Because I am going to be testing Shard-Query, I have chosen to partition the “fact” table (lineorder) by month. I’ve attached the full DDL at the end of the post as well as the queries again for reference.

I want to note a few things about the results:
First and foremost, TokuDB was configured to use quicklz compression (the default) and InnoDB compression was not used. No tuning of TokuDB was performed, which means it will use up to 50% of memory by default. Various InnoDB tuning options were set (see the end of the post) but the most important is that the …

Here are my slides from past conferences. They were generated from Org Mode and Beamer. You can read more about it here.

You can get more info on the talks on their respective pages(linked).

Talk at FOSDEM 2013:

Feed me more: MySQL Memory analysed from Raghavendra Prabhu Talk at PLMCE 2013:

…

5 years of MySQL

People often write a blog post when they reach some nice anniversary since they joined MySQL community. Well, for those old enough it usually means when they joined MySQL AB as employee. For me this was January 2008. Because I didn't remember the month correctly, I haven't blogged anything then, but decided to save it for a better opportunity - now.

TL;DR Starting this week I will be working for 10gen, selling MongoDB to the Nordics. This blog post is really long - even then it doesn't contain the most interesting stories, I'm not sure if they can ever be published. Sorry for the length, but remember you don't need to read all at once. This is my last MySQL post so save some of it for cold winter days!

2008 - Sun acquisition

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