The latest from the MySQL community

December 19, 2013 By Severalnines

Database clusters are pretty sophisticated distributed systems with complex dependencies between nodes. The failure of a node will generally impact the overall cluster, as the remaining nodes need to reconfigure themselves to continue to operate without the failed node. Since re-introducing a node will also affect the existing cluster, the timing could therefore be dependent on the state of the other nodes in the cluster. Repair and restarts often needs to be performed in a particular order in compliance with the redundancy model of the cluster so as not to jeopardize the normal functioning of existing nodes.

Webinar: Repair and Recovery for your MySQL, MariaDB and MongoDB/TokuMX clusters

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December 10, 2013 By Severalnines

As a follow-up to the Webinar on Zero Downtime Schema Changes in Galera Cluster, we’ll now walk you through the detailed steps on how to update your schema. The two methods (TOI and RSU) have both their pros and cons, and given parameters like table size, indexes, key_buffer_size, disk speed, etc., it is possible to estimate the time taken for the schema to be upgraded. Also, please note that a schema change is non-transactional so it would not be possible to rollback the DDL if it fails midway. Therefore, it is always recommended to test the schema changes and ensure you have recoverable backups before performing this on your production clusters. 

This post examines the way DDL changes are propagated in Galera, and outlines the steps to upgrade the …

December 5, 2013 By Severalnines

Thanks to everyone who attended yesterday’s webinar; if you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

Thanks again to our speaker, Seppo Jaakola from Codership, the creators of Galera Cluster, for this in-depth talk on Galera Cluster Best Practices - Zero Downtime Schema Changes.

Webinar topics covered

• How to perform Zero Downtime Schema Changes
• 2 main methods: TOI and RSU
• Total Order Isolation: predictability and consistency
• Rolling Schema Upgrades
• pt-online-schema-change
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December 4, 2013 By Severalnines

As OpenStack deployments mature from evaluation/development to production environments supporting apps and services, high-availability becomes a key requirement. In a previous post, we showed you how to cluster the database backend - which is central to the operation of OpenStack. In that setup, you would have two controllers, while placing a 3-node Galera cluster on separate hosts. Now, it can be quite a leap to go from one VM with all services running on it, to a fully distributed setup with 5 VMs. The good news is that you can have a highly available setup starting with just 3 VMs.

In this post, we are going to show you how to cluster OpenStack Havana in a minimal node setup with 2 controllers and one compute node. Our controllers will be running all OpenStack services, as well as clustered RabbitMQ …

I get a lot of questions about Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 (PXC 5.6), specifically about whether such and such MySQL 5.6 Community Edition feature is in PXC 5.6.  The short answer is: yes, all features in community MySQL 5.6 are in Percona Server 5.6 and, in turn, are in PXC 5.6.  Whether or not the new feature is useful in 5.6 really depends on how useful it is in general with Galera.

I thought it would be useful to highlight a few features and try to show them working:

Innodb Fulltext Indexes

Yes, FTS works in Innodb in 5.6, so why wouldn’t it work in PXC 5.6?  To test this I used the Sakila database , which contains a single table with FULLTEXT.  In the sakila-schema.sql file, it is still designated a MyISAM table:

Now that Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 is out in beta, I wanted to start a series talking about new features in Galera 3 and PXC 5.6.  On the surface, Galera 3 doesn’t reveal a lot of new features yet, but there has been a lot of refactoring of the system in preparation for great new features in the future.

Galera vs MySQL options

wsrep_provider_options is a semi-colon separated list of key => value configurations that set low-level Galera library configuration.  These tweak the actual cluster communication and replication in the group communication system.  By contrast, other PXC global variables (like ‘wsrep%’) are set like other mysqld options and generally have more to do with MySQL/Galera …

November 14, 2013 By Severalnines

Database schema changes are usually not popular among DBAs or sysadmins, not when you are operating a cluster and cannot afford to switch off the service during a maintenance window. There are different ways to perform schema changes, some procedures being more complicated than others. We invited Seppo from the Codership team to tell us about the options. If you’d like to learn more, please register for our new webinar.

Webinar: Galera Cluster Best Practices - Zero Downtime Schema Changes

Tuesday, December 3rd 2013

Register now - Europe/MEA/APAC

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November 4, 2013 By Severalnines Percona Live London MySQL Conference - 11-12th November, 2013

We’re particularly excited about this year’s Percona Live London MySQL Conference. The line-up of speakers & topics looks excellent and it’s good to see speakers from Oracle, Percona, the MariaDB Foundation (amongst others) scheduled at the same event. It demonstrates not just the diversity of the ever broadening MySQL ecosystem, but also the fact that there really is room for everyone to contribute, participate in and advance MySQL in manifold directions while still retaining a certain amount of uniformity.

And this is how we will be contributing to the event ...

Talk - MySQL Cluster Performance Tuning By Johan Andersson, CTO & Co-Founder, Severalnines

Correct tuning of MySQL NDB Cluster can have dramatic impact on …

MySQL Fabric is a very promising sharding framework. If I take Ulf Wendel definition of MySQL Fabric :

MySQL Fabric is an administration tool to build large “farms” of MySQL servers. In its most basic form, a farm is a collection of MySQL Replication clusters. In its most advanced form, a farm is a collection of [...]

The Percona Monitoring Plugins (PMP) provide some free tools to make it easier to monitor PXC/Galera nodes.  Monitoring broadly falls into two categories: alerting and historical graphing, and the plugins support Nagios and Cacti, respectively, for those purposes.

Graphing

An update to the PMP this summer (thanks to our Remote DBA team for supporting this!) added a Galera-specific host template that includes a variety of Galera-related stats, including:

• Replication …