One of the challenges many face when running a secure encrypted MySQL backup on Linux is using managed or scheduled mysqldumps without exposing them.

1. The data – within the mysqldump backup file
2. The credentials – that are used connect into mysql

So, how might this be accomplished? I’ll show you one option. It starts with the installation of Gazzang’s ezNcrypt. Its not open source, but it is inexpensive and provides you a simple and secure means to protect and encrypt data transparently with the flexibly to map to your environment and applications.

This technique also applies to other backup tools such as xtrabackup.

This can also go along with transparently encrypting your mysql data.  I discussed this on oursql  podcast …

Continuent is proud to sponsor Percona Live MySQL Conference in London! You will want to catch these talks tomorrow:Tuesday, October 25th at 10:15 AM - Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Tungsten Enterprise Clusters for MySQL by Robert HodgesTuesday, October 25th at 1:30 PM - MySQL Parallel Replication in 5 Minutes or Less by Robert HodgesTuesday, October 25th at 2:30 PM - MySQL Replication Outside

In the recent few weeks I have spent some time for creating yet another slave prefetching tool named "Replication Booster (for MySQL)", written in C/C++ and using Binlog API. Now I'm happy to say that I have released an initial version at GitHub repository.

The objective of Replication Booster is same as mk-slave-prefetch: avoiding or reducing replication delay under disk i/o bound workloads. This is done by prefetching relay logs events, converting to SELECT, and executing SELECT before SQL Thread executes the events. Then SQL thread can be much faster because target blocks are already cached.

On my benchmarking environment Replication Booster works pretty …

Given that thread and connections in the MySQL Server
have been so intertwined, it is easy to confuse the
purpose of the MySQL Thread Pool and the purpose of
a Connection Pool.

The aim of a Connection Pool is that the MySQL
clients should not be forced to constantly do connect and
disconnect. Thus it is possible to cache a connection in
the MySQL client when a user of the connection no longer
needs it. Thus another user that needs a connection to the
same MySQL Server can reuse this cached connection later on.

This saves execution time in both the client and the server.
It does however not change the dynamics of how many queries
are executed in parallel in the MySQL Server. This means that
the likelihood of too many concurrent queries to execute in
the MySQL Server is the same with or without a Connection
Pool.

Also a …

Dealing with large data sets makes it necessary to pick out only the newest or the hottest elements and not displaying everything. In order to have older items still available, Pagination navigation's have become established. However, implementing a Pagination with MySQL is one of those problems that can be optimized poorly with MySQL and certainly other RDBM systems. However, knowing the underlying database can also help in optimizing pagination queries, because there is no real copy and paste solution.

Read More »

Dealing with large data sets makes it necessary to pick out only the newest or the hottest elements and not displaying everything. In order to have older items still available, Pagination navigation's have become established. However, implementing a Pagination with MySQL is one of those problems that can be optimized poorly with MySQL and certainly other RDBM systems. However, knowing the underlying database can also help in optimizing pagination queries, because there is no real copy and paste solution.

Read More »

The free Mysqlnd replication and load balancing plugin now offers load balancing and lazy connections independent of read write splitting. This makes the plugin attractive for MySQL Cluster users. All nodes participating in a MySQL Cluster can serve all requests, they all accept read and write requests. No statement redirection needs to be done. An application using MySQL Cluster has only one task: load balance requests over MySQL frontends (SQL Nodes).

The most important variable to monitor is threads_running. This
variable keeps track of the number of concurrent statements
currently executing in the MySQL Server.

If this variable has spikes that put it in a region where the
server won't operate optimally (usually going beyond 40 for
InnoDB workloads) and most particular if it goes well beyond
this into the hundreds or even thousands of concurrent
statements then the thread pool will be something beneficial
to protect the MySQL Server from troubles in overload
situations.

Another indicator that you will benefit from use of the thread
pool is when you already now use the --innodb-thread-concurrency
variable. This variable tries to solve a similar problem and the
thread pool solves it at a better place even before query execution
has started and also provides additional benefits.
…

A big week for conferences in Europe this week. We’re starting it off at Percona Live London 2011 (see previous post), with both Sergei Golubchik and Colin Charles presenting talks on Tuesday 25 October 2011.

Right after, we’re headed to LinuxCon Europe, where Colin Charles will discuss The MySQL Diaspora and how there exists much choice for people today (it is not just stock MySQL one can use nowadays).

Monty Program is sponsoring both Percona Live London as well as LinuxCon Europe. We’ll be having a booth at LinuxCon Europe, probably right next to our friends SkySQL, as we did at LinuxCon North America (Vancouver).

I'm now in London for the Percona Live conference! Come see me at 1:30 tomorrow tuesday October 24 and hear about running databases, BIG databases, in a cloud environment. MongoDB, Sphinx, MySQL what have you, all running in a Amazon EC2 environment. Lots of data,, lots of resources, lots of disks! And lots of fun!

/Karlsson