Databases are the center of today’s web, enterprise and embedded applications, storing and protecting an organization’s most valuable assets and supporting business-critical applications. Just minutes of downtime can result in significant lost revenue and dissatisfied customers. Ensuring database highly availability is therefore a top priority for any organization.

The new MySQL Guide to High Availability solutions is designed to navigate users through the HA maze, discussing:

- The causes, effects and impacts of downtime;

- Methodologies to select the right HA solution;

- Different approaches to delivering highly available MySQL services;

- Operational best practices to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

As discussed in the new Guide, selecting the high availability solution …

Very soon after SkySQL Ab was created, we added an Advanced MySQL Cluster course to our training offering. This addition was made as a customer who was already quite experienced with MySQL cluster wanted training. This course was, however, deemed to be too complex and with too much pre-requisites to add to our public offering so it was left as a special treat for customers who had deep cluster knowledge. We decided that we would instead create a more general purpose MySQL Cluster course with less prerequisite knowledge required as soon as possible.
Many months have passed and a lot of other courses have been created since, but we now finally release our version of a general purpose MySQL Cluster training course, called Administering MySQL Cluster. As the name suggests this 3-day course is for administering MySQL Cluster and it does require …

Probably …

Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering

Oracle has announced support for running MySQL on Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC); with so many people developing and deploying MySQL on Windows, this offers a great option to add High Availability to MySQL deployments if you don’t want to go as far as deploying MySQL Cluster.

This post will give a brief overview of how to set things up but for all of the gory details a new white paper MySQL with Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering is available – please give me any feedback. I will also be presenting on this at a …

Supporting successful services on the web means scaling your back-end databases across multiple dimensions. This blog focuses on scaling access methods to your data using SQL and/or NoSQL interfaces.

In Part 1 of the blog series , I discussed scaling database performance using auto-sharding and active/active geographic replication in MySQL Cluster to enable applications to scale both within and across data centers.  

In Part 2, I discussed the need to scale operational agility to keep pace with demand, which includes being able to add capacity and performance to the database, and to evolve the schema – all without downtime.

So in this blog I want …

MySQL Cluster is, without doubt, the most interesting MySQL product Oracle offers to the people out there. It’s the flagship, the holy grail, based on the knowledge and technology developed doing our well known MySQL Server. I’m not going to go through why MySQL Cluster is so great, that you can find anywhere. I’m going [...]

In my previous post, I discussed scaling web database performance in MySQL Cluster using auto-sharding and active/active geographic replication - enabling users to scale both within and across data centers.  

I also mentioned that while scaling write-performance of any web service is critical, it is only 1 of multiple dimensions to scalability, which include:

- The need to scale operational agility to keep pace with demand. This means being able to add capacity and performance to the database, and to evolve the schema – all without downtime;

- The need to scale queries by having flexibility in the APIs used to access the database – including SQL and NoSQL interfaces;

- The need to scale the database while maintaining continuous availability.

All of these subjects are discussed in more detail in …

This post explains how to debug MySQL Cluster 7.1, installed using the RPM packages, using gdb on a Linux box (Red Hat, Oracle Enterprise Linux, CentOS, ..).

When a data node crashes lots of information goes into the error log, trace files and out log. However, it makes sometimes sense when you can repeat the crash, to run the data node in debug mode, or using gdb.

First, using RPMs and a Linux distribution, make sure you have the ‘debuginfo’ package installed. For example, for Red Hat or Oracle Enterprise Linux on a 64-bit machine, this package would be called: MySQL-Cluster-gpl-debuginfo-7.1.15-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm .

Create a file with the following commands, we will name it ‘ndbd.gdb’:

set pagination off
set logging overwrite on
set logging file …

Clustered computing brings with it many benefits: high performance, high availability, scalable infrastructure, etc. But it also brings with it more complexity.

Why?

Well, by its very nature, there are more “moving parts” to monitor and manage (from physical, virtual and logical hosts) to clustering software to redundant networking components – the list goes on. And a cluster that isn’t effectively provisioned and managed will cause more downtime than the standalone systems it is designed to improve upon.

When it comes to the database industry, analysts already estimate that 50% of a typical database’s Total Cost of Ownership is attributable to staffing and downtime costs. These costs will only increase if a database cluster is not effectively monitored and managed.

Monitoring and management has been a major focus in the development of the …

The realities of today’s successful web services are creating new demands that many legacy databases were just not designed to handle:

- The need to scale writes, as well as reads, both within and across geographically dispersed data centers;

- The need to scale operational agility to keep pace with database load and application requirements. This means being able to add capacity and performance to the database, and to evolve the schema – all without downtime;

- The need to scale queries by having flexibility in the APIs used to access the database;

- The need to scale the database while maintaining continuous availability for both failures as well as scheduled maintenance events.

Each of the requirements above warrant their own dedicated blog, which I’ll find time to write over the next few weeks.

But to get started, I wanted to discuss how the MySQL Cluster database addresses the first …