Well, it happened again…  Another lengthy EBS outage in the US-East region impacted several sites across the net.  While failures like this are rare, they can be quite costly and translate into headaches for the operations team when impact production systems for any length of time.  At Percona, we routinely help clients architect and deploy highly available systems designed with disaster recovery in the cloud.  Here are a few high level best practices that I’ve seen when helping clients with AWS deployments:

1. Plan for failure
2. Plan for failure
3. Plan for … you get the idea

Plan for Failure

The single most critical piece is to plan for and expect failure.  The ease of setting an infrastructure in the cloud combined …

I’m excited by all of the recent developments surrounding the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo! Our own Baron Schwartz will moderate the Diamond Keynote Panel entitled “Future Perfect: The Road Ahead for MySQL” which will feature a panel of MySQL industry leaders, including: Sundar Raghavan, director product management at Amazon; Paul Mikesell, CEO of Clustrix; a representative from HP; and, a representative from McAfee. The Diamond Sponsor Keynote Panel will take place at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, April 12th and provide insight into the future of MySQL technology, adoption, and the ecosystem landscape. I am also very pleased to introduce two new sponsors including McAfee which recently joined as a Diamond Sponsor and AOL which …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo is going to be awesome! Great speakers, an A-list of sponsors, countless opportunities to engage with the community, and an enthusiastic crowd of MySQL users ensure this is going to be a great event. The conference features 72 breakout sessions, keynotes by leading industry luminaries, an optional day of 16 tutorial sessions, a bustling exhibit hall, and numerous opportunities to connect with other community members.

I am pleased to announce the conference Birds of a Feather sessions and Lightning Talks. Birds of a Feather sessions will be Tuesday and Wednesday nights following the evening receptions. Lightning Talks will be …

My friends at Sphinx Technologies have finally released new beta of Sphinx – Sphinx 2.0.2. It includes about 6 months of development and includes over 30 new features and tons of bug fixes. I’m happy to see how Sphinx 2.0 is shaping up a lot of rough corners are being polished and I’m hopeful we will see very solid Stable Sphinx 2.0 within next 3 to 6 months. In fact Sphinx 2.0.3-rc is promised within 1 month.

What MySQL Users will find interesting in this release is a lot of work on SphinxQL the Sphinx’s language similar to SQL. Now it support number of functions such as SET NAMES which make it possible to connect to Sphinx as if it were MySQL Server with more advanced connectors which issue such commands when they set up connection. …

A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts in the format I was planning. Instead, I want to write an overview of these two approaches to hosting MySQL in the Amazon cloud.

In general, MySQL performance overall on EC2 and EBS isn’t always great in comparison to what you can get on physical hardware, even low-to-medium sized servers. It’s not that it’s terrible (in most cases), but it’s not always great. There are specific use cases in which it’s perfectly acceptable and even good, but the range of cases isn’t as broad as what you can push your …

I wrote about Galera about 1.5 years ago: State of the art: Galera – synchronous replication for InnoDB. It was about the 0.7 release, which was more like a proof-of-concept release (though Galera’s developers may not agree with that ) with some serious limitations (like using mysqldump for node propagation). The Galera team heard my suggestions and the new 0.8 release looks very promising. Well, it took 1.5 years to fix the limitations and come up with new features, but there is nothing to complain about it – a synchronous distributed transactional system is not an easy problem to solve, trust me.

So Galera 0.8 comes with many nice features:

• Works with MySQL 5.1 and MariaDB 5.1. The latest is more interesting for us, as it is based on XtraDB. That means Galera supports the XtraDB …

Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available

There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here on out. Shard-Query is very flexible in it’s configuration, so you can use this sample database to spread processing over up to 20 nodes.

The Infobright Community Edition (ICE) images are available in 32 and 64 bit varieties. Due to memory requirements, the InnoDB versions are only available on 64 bit instances. MySQL will fail to start on a micro instance, simply decrease the values in the /etc/my.cnf file if you really want to try micro instances.

*EDIT*
The storage worker currently logs too much …

We’ve just rented more rooms, and published an additional two tracks of speakers for Percona Live in New York on May 26th. The schedule is here. There is a long queue of speaker submissions we’re finalizing and will be adding to the schedule, to fill the few empty slots in those new rooms.

My favorite not-yet-confirmed session is from a company who has built their business in the Amazon cloud, and has seen just about every angle of running a large database in the cloud. This isn’t an extraordinary database, all things considered — as they told me, “it’s not a science fiction use case. It’s just science fiction to run it in the cloud.” That is precisely why this is such an interesting story to hear. There is a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from people who’ve done such things.

Tickets are selling fast, and we still expect to …

“The least expensive query is the query you never run.”

Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding using those resources. You need an efficient and reliable cache in order to achieve the desired result. Your end users also care about response times because this affects their work productivity or their enjoyment of your service. This post describes some of the most common cache methods for MySQL.

Popular cache methods

The MySQL query cache

When the query cache is enabled, MySQL examines each query to see if the contents have been stored in the query cache. If the results have been cached they are used instead of actually running the query.. This improves the response time …

This is a continuation of my series of benchmark posts comparing Amazon RDS to a server running on Amazon EC2. Upcoming posts (probably 6 or 8 in total) will extend the scope of the benchmark to include data on our Dell r900 with traditional hard drives in RAID10, and a server in the Joyent cloud. As a reminder, my goal was to run a long-term benchmark and see how the instance performed over time. Can it sustain performance over a several-day period of intense workload? The first step was to determine the number of threads that should be used for the benchmark.

To gauge this, I ran a series of 60-second benchmarks on the RDS server, and extracted the transactions per second from them, then used the peak throughput as my target configuration. The benchmark was sysbench oltp complex, with 400 million rows (88GB of data and indexes, which is larger than memory in all of the servers I benchmarked). Here are the results:

#Threads …