Itchy Ninja Software is pleased to announce the release of Analyst for MySQL v1.1. Revolutionize the way you work and administrate MySQL, MariaDB, Galera, and Percona XtraDB installations.

Make More Efficient Use of Your Time

Gathering all of the metrics to diagnose a database installation is a very time consuming process, and many simply do not have the experience to know where to begin. With Analyst for MySQL, you will be able to get your hands on hundreds of metrics within moments. It really takes all of the guesswork, as well as tedious long sessions of writing queries out of managing a MySQL database server.

Cross-Platform

Not only can you run the program on Windows, Mac, or Linux, you can also generate server reports from each of those platforms as well! No need to install anything on the server at any time. All diagnostics are run from your laptop or desktop machine. The …

Today Oracle released MySQL 5.7.6 milestone 16. With this, MySQL 5.7 has been in development for over 2 years.
Compared to MySQL 5.6, the changes are quite extensive. The main effort of the team has been focused on speed, with performance reportedly improved from 2 to 3 times compared to previous releases.
A full list of what is new would take too much space here, but I would like to mention some key points:

• Oracle has spent a considerable amount of energy in the improvement of MySQL security and safety. You will see many new features, but even more old features that were deprecated and more that were removed after deprecation in 5.6.
• The installation process has been changing in every …

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
  …

Now it’s time to setup proper monitoring to avoid unpleasant surprises in future.

There are two major problems the monitoring solves: alerting and trending. Alerting is to notify a responsible person about some major event like service stopped working. Trending is to track the change of something over time – disk or memory usage over time, replication lag etc.

This post will be about alerting with Nagios.

The major problem with most of Nagios setups I’ve seen is excessive amount of false positives. This kills whole idea of monitoring. The matter is when an admin gets a false alert they tend to mute it, explicitly or implicitly. They either filter alerts out or don’t treat them seriously. In general case the alert must be worth to wake up the admin in the middle of the night. If the alert isn’t worth as much the real problem will be ignored sooner or …

In the last 10 years I have worked a lot with replication systems, and I have developed a keen interest in the topic of multiple masters in a single cluster. My interest has a two distinct origins:

• On one hand, I have interacted countless times with users who want to use a replication system as a drop-in replacement for a single server. In many cases, especially when users are dealing with applications that are not much flexible or modular, this means that the replication system must have several points of data entry, and such points must work independently and in symbiosis with the rest of the nodes.
• On the other hand, I am a technology lover (look it up in the dictionary: it is spelled geek), and as such I get my curiosity stirred whenever I discover a new possibility of implementing multi-master systems.

The double nature of this professional curiosity makes me sometimes forget that the …

Intro

Tungsten Replicator is an open source tool that does high performance replication across database servers. It was designed to replace MySQL replication, although it also supports replication from and to Oracle and other systems. In this article, we will only cover MySQL replication, both simple and multi-master.

Preparing for installation

To follow the material in this article, you will need a recent build of Tungsten Replicator. You can get the latest ones from http://bit.ly/tr20_builds. In this article, we are using build 2.0.8-167.

Before starting any installation, you should make sure that you have satisfied all the prerequisites. Don't underestimate the list. Any missing …

In this webinar we will show step by step how to install, configure, and test TokuDB for a typical performance evaluation. We’ll also be flagging potential pitfalls that can ruin the eval results. It will describe the differences between installing from scratch and replacing an existing MySQL / MariaDB installation. It will also review the most common issues that may arise when running TokuDB binaries.

Date: December 11th
Time: 2 PM EST / 11 AM PST
REGISTER TODAY

Topics will include:

• Memory allocation
• Initial data load
• Indexing, including clustering indexes
• compression algorithms

We look forward to having you join the …

Working with replication, you come across many topologies, some of them sound and established, some of them less so, and some of them still in the realm of the hopeless wishes. I have been working with replication for almost 10 years now, and my wish list grew quite big during this time. In the last 12 months, though, while working at Continuent, some of the topologies that I wanted to work with have moved from the cloud of wishful thinking to the firm land of things that happen. My quest for star replication starts with the most common topology. One master, many slaves.

It looks like a star, with the rays extending from the master to the slaves. This is the basis of most of the replication going on mostly everywhere nowadays, and it has few surprises. Setting aside the …

One lesson learned in more than two decades working in this industry is that most of the IT professionals are impatient, want to achieve results immediately, and, most importantly, they don't read documentation. Much as the average geek is happy to answer many requests with a dismissive RTFM, the same geeks are not as diligent when it comes to learning about new or updated technologies. For this reason, there is a kind of documentation that is very much appreciated by busy and impatient professionals: cookbooks. And I am not talking about food. Geeks are not known for being cooks (1) and they like fast food. I am talking about collection of technical recipes, short articles where a problem is briefly stated, and a direct solution is shown. Working with Tungsten Replicator, I am constantly amazed at all the things you can do with it, and at the same time, I am amazed at how so few …

1. This page or area of the website is very slow, why?

There are a lot of components that make up modern internet websites, and a lot of places to get stuck in the mud.  Website performance starts with the browser, what caching it is doing, their bandwidth to your server, what the webserver is doing (caching or not and how), if the webserver has sufficient memory, and then what the application code is doing and lastly how it is interacting with the backend database.

With all this complexity, it's no wonder so many sites struggle.  Typically these types of analysis start with some load testing, to stress test your setup, so you can watch for leaks.  Then some tools are applied to the webserver tier, and the database tier to see where the bottleneck lies.  It may be in the network …