Just under a year ago on my old blog I discussed and even demoed the new Linux live kernel patching solutions. I was reviewing these technologies out of my own curiosity as well as HP's Advanced Technology Group having an interest. I think these technologies are great, I am personally more of a fan of the user experience of RedHat's kpatch solution but any solution is a great technical achievement.

Having said this I believe that the use case for this technology is quite narrow. Last time I looked into these technologies only patches that affected the code of functions could be modified. Changing structs and data definitely didn't work and I suspect that changing function declarations was also dangerous. There is also a performance …

MySQL Installation Process Checklist

All DBAs, regardless of experience level, should follow a written process when setting up a new server.  There are just too many steps to neglect doing so and many of the steps you are likely to forget have little to do with MySQL.

Naturally, every company has a different process.  The process we outline below is one we have used in the past and focuses on working through the Change Management process, setting up backups and monitoring, and focusing on good communication with team members and clients as well as ensuring documentation of your work.  Hopefully this article will give you some ideas on implementing your own process document.

Below are the steps we have documented in the past when creating a new installation of MySQL:

• Initial Change Management Processes
  • Edit the ticket and set to Waiting on Customer
  …

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/2/9/534

Building on the original kSplice idea and combining the efforts of the work done at Red Hat and SuSE, common infrastructure is now ready to be put into the Linux 3.20 mainline kernel – Red Hat and SuSE have already committed to using this.

I still reckon it’s freaky trickery, but heck – it works, and it’s great for server environments that have no redundancy (I prefer to fix that issue!) and can’t afford any downtime.

Section I: Fractal Tree and Optimization Overview
Tokutek’s Fractal Tree® technology provides fast performance by injecting small messages into buffers inside the Fractal Tree index. This allows writes to be batched, thus eliminating I/O that is required in traditional B-tree indexes for every operation. Additional background information on how Fractal Trees operate can be found in Zardosht Kasheff’s blog entitled, TokuMX Fractal Tree Indexes, What Are They? Don’t be thrown off by the title, Fractal Tree Indexes access data in the same way for TokuDB as they do for TokuMX.

For tables whose workload pattern is a high number of sequential deletes, some operational maintenance is required to ensure consistently fast performance.  If this is not done, delete messages and garbage can exist in the Fractal …

In my previous post, I talked about implementing multi-threaded replication (MTR) using Percona Server 5.6. The server pairs that are utilizing MTR are also exclusively using the TokuDB storage engine.

I find TokuDB to be a fascinating engine. I can tell I will need to re-watch our Dbhangops session where Tim Callaghan talked about the differences between B-Tree and Fractal Tree indexes. There’s also a session on how compression works in …

I recently updated the High Performance MySQL website to modernize it. I am impressed at how easy it is these days to get a great little brochure site hosted. It used to be a lot more work. I used a variety of tools and services to do this and decided to share this for people who are interested. Hopefully you’ll add comments and point me towards more tools and tips to make these things even easier for me in the future!

Before

The website used to be a WordPress blog. This used to be my go-to solution for everything. It used to be the easiest way to whip together something quickly and put it online.

But WordPress sites have a bunch of problems.

• They need a database. Database down, website down.
• They need care and feeding. WordPress is a major hack target and you have to update it or you’re going to end up serving malware and ads without …

I recently updated the High Performance MySQL website to modernize it. I am impressed at how easy it is these days to get a great little brochure site hosted. It used to be a lot more work. I used a variety of tools and services to do this and decided to share this for people who are interested. Hopefully you’ll add comments and point me towards more tools and tips to make these things even easier for me in the future!

Before

The website used to be a WordPress blog. This used to be my go-to solution for everything. It used to be the easiest way to whip together something quickly and put it online.

But WordPress sites have a bunch of problems.

• They need a database. Database down, website down.
• They need care and feeding. WordPress is a major hack target and you have to update it or you’re going to end up serving malware and ads without …

Many of you have already heard about NoSQL databases and one of the the most used tool is Memcached, where you add a cache layer between the application and database. Since MySQL version 5.6, a new plugin is available to do the integration between MySQL and Memcached. On this article, we will learn how to install it on linux, and some basic configurations of it.

Pre-requirements:
Install libevent

Installation:
To install memcached support we will need to create a few tables responsible for MySQL and memcached integration. MySQL already includes the file which creates those tables (innodb_memcached_config.sql), you can find this file in a sub folder of your basedir. To discover where is your basedir, run the bellow command:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'basedir';
+---------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+---------------+-------+
| basedir       | /usr  | …

In the recently released TokuDB 7.5.5 the implementation of TokuDB hot-backup moved from a patch to the MySQL Server, to MySQL Plugin.  Why did we make this change?

TokuDB hot backup makes a transactionally consistent copy of the TokuDB files while applications continue to read and write these files.  Christian Rober wrote a nice series of blogs about how hot backup works.  See TokuDB hot backup 1 and TokuDB hot backup 2 for details.  In summary, the TokuDB hot backup library intercepts system calls that write files and duplicates the writes on backup files. It does this while copying files to the backup directory.

There are two changes made to MySQL to get TokuDB hot backup working.

First, the hot backup …

Being a QA Engineer, how would you feel if you had access to a framework which can generate 80+ crashes – a mix of hitting developer introduced assertions (situations that should not happen), and serious unforeseen binary crashes – for the world’s most popular open source database software – each and ever hour? What if you could do this running on a medium spec machine – even a laptop?

The seniors amongst you may object “But… generating a crash or assertion is one thing – creating a repeatable testcase for the same is quite another.”

Introducing pquery, mtr_to_sql, reducer.sh (the pquery-enabled version), and more:

80+ coredumps per hour. Fully automatic testcase creation. Near-100% testcase reproducibility. C++ core. 15 Seconds run time per trial. Up to 20-25k lines of SQL executed per trial. CLI testcases. Compatible with sporadic issues. High-end automation of many aspects.

It all …