Ever hear of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0? It was released on November the 10th of 2010 . . just over a year ago. In the last couple of days Oracle released the latest version of MySQL Server (5.5.18). Along with the bug fixes, etc they released RPM packages that cover RH EL 6.

Finally. A year later.

Not one given to griping, but really..does it take that long to roll packages for the new version? There were no significant changes in the operating system..in fact the RH EL 5 packages worked on RHEL 6 from my (albeit) limited experience with the combination.

I don't jump onto new versions of operating systems as soon as they come out. I prefer to let others be my beta testers before I put something into production. However, waiting a year seems a bit extreme for this release.

Even so, it's out now so enjoy! Now we have no excuse for not deploying 5.5.

km

…

Until now, MariaDB 5.2 was lacking a yum repository for easy installs and upgrades. It is now available, thanks to OurDelta.

Just follow our very simple installation instructions.

I’ve recently updated my CentOS 5 x86_64 rpms for bacula-5.0.3. Hope they are useful to you.

In some environments using a distro package management system may* provide benefits including handling dependencies and providing a simpler approach when there are no dedicated DBA or SA resources.

However, the incorrect use can result in pain and in this instance production downtime. Even with dedicated resources at an unnamed premium managed hosting provider, the simple mistake of assumption resulted in over 30 minutes of unplanned downtime during peak time.

One of the disadvantages of using a system such as rpm is the lack of control in managing the starting and stopping of your MySQL instance, and the second is unanticipated package dependency upgrades.

So what happened with this client. When attempting to use the MySQL client on the production server, I got the following error.

$ mysql -uxxx -p
error while loading shared libraries: libmysqlclient.so.10: cannot open shared object file: No such file or …

I’ve recently updated my CentOS 5 x86_64 rpms for bacula-5.0.2.

Hope they are useful to you.

I recently received a question from Robin Schumacher at Calpont, the makers of the InfiniDB analytics database engine for MySQL: "How would you recommend we try and get bundled in with the various Linux distros?"

Since this question has come up several times before, I thought it might make sense to blog about my take on this.

First of all, please note that there is a difference between "being part of the core distribution" and "being available from a distributor's package repository". The latter one is relatively easy, the former can be hard, as you need to convince the distributor that your application is worth devoting engineering resources to maintain and support your application as part of their product. It's also a space issue – distributions need to make sure that the core packages still fit on the installation …

Over at the OPenARK blog Shlomi Noach argues that using apt-get or yum to install your MySQL instance will one day most likeley break your MySQL setup. Depdendencies, distros not shipping the MySQL version you want to use and on some distro's indeed the mysql vs MySQL issue, agreed, it all makes things less trivial.

However why give up a clean packaged system if there are other ways out ?

First of all by claiming that such an installation can break a working production environment looks to me like admitting you don't have a split development, production environment and that rather than testing stuff upfront indeed you just hack a long in production.

So rather than using a tarball for the MySQL instance an --force to satisfy the missing dependencies (hence also cluttering your system) , a much cleaner and less error prone setup …

I have been upgrading more MySQL database instances recently and have found a few more potential gotchas, which if you are not careful, can potentially be rather nasty. These are not documented explicitly by MySQL, so it may be handy for you to know if you have not come across this type of thing before.

Most of the issues are those related to upgrading MySQL instances which are replicated, either the master servers or the slaves. Some seem specific to the rpm packages I am using (MySQL enterprise or MySQL advanced rpms), though others are not.

Take care upgrading a 5.0 master when you have 5.1 slaves

It is not a good idea to run a mixed major version of mysql in a replicated environment so why would I be doing this? If you work in a replicated environment and have several slaves then it is recommended that you upgrade the slaves first. I work with quite a few slaves so the process of upgrading them all takes longer …

Normally I like to use the OS’s package manager to manage the software on my system. This ensures that things are done consistently. When managing MySQL I’d also like to manage all my instances the same way. That makes life easier for me but also for my fellow DBAs and sysadmin colleagues.

I use CentOS and the rpm packages it provides and these work quite well. However, the MySQL rpms do not allow me to manage single and multiple instances alike and while mysqld runs as the mysql user the instance management needs to be done as root (stopping, starting instances, or default access). If you want to run multiple instances you can also use mysqld_multi, but that’s not the default setup.

So this is not ideal. While this may not be much of an issue if you manage a single server, if you manage tens or …

I have a problem with an easy way to install MySQL via rpm without resorting to specifying the exact point release of MySQL. Presently my local yum repository has versions of 5.0, 5.1,5.4 and 5.5.

If I want to install MySQL Sever, I can just run:

$ sudo yum install -y MySQL-server
Setting up Install Process
Package MySQL-server-community-5.5.0-1.rhel5.x86_64 already installed and latest version
Nothing to do

The issue here is the most current version is installed. If I want to install the most current version of 5.1 for example, I have found no way to specify MySQL-server-5.1, or MySQL-server-community-5.1, I have to specify the point release MySQL-server-community-5.1.40

I suspect there is some internal aliasing that may be possible within rpm’s to support this. I’m seeking help from any rpm experts and would appreciate any feedback.

My current products include:

$ sudo yum list …