People using OpenStack Trove instances can hit a common issue in the MySQL world: how to perform schema change operations while minimizing the impact on the database server? Let’s explore the options that can allow online schema changes.

Summary

With MySQL 5.5, pt-online-schema-change from Percona Toolkit is your best option for large tables while regular ALTER TABLE statements are only acceptable for small tables. Also beware of metadata locks.

With MySQL 5.6, almost all types of schema changes can be done online. Metadata locks can also be an issue. pt-online-schema-change can still be worth using as it is also online on read replicas.

Regular ALTER TABLE with MySQL 5.5

If you are still using MySQL 5.5, almost all schema changes will require a table …

November 14, 2014 By Severalnines

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in this week's webinar on '9 DevOps Tips for Going in Production with Galera Cluster for MySQL'. If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

In this webinar, Severalnines CTO Johan Andersson discussed 9 key aspects to consider before taking Galera Cluster for MySQL into production:

• 101 Sanity Check
• Operating System
• Backup Strategies
• Galera Recovery
• Query Performance
• Schema changes
• Security / Encryption
• Reporting
• Protecting from Disasters

Watch the replay 9 DevOps Tips for Going in …

The 2014 edition of Percona Live London brought together attendees from 30 countries to hear insightful talks from leaders in the MySQL community. The conference kicked off on Monday with a full day of tutorials followed by the very popular Community Dinner featuring a double decker bus shuttle from the conference to the event.

Tuesday started with keynote talks by representatives from MySQL, VMware, HGST, Codership, and Percona. I particularly enjoyed the talks by Tomas Ulin of MySQL (which highlighted the upcoming MySQL 5.7 release) and Robert Hodges of VMware (which focused on the evolution of MySQL). The remainder of the day was filled by six time slots of breakout sessions (30 sessions in all) broken into 10 tracks. The day wrapped up with the always popular Community Networking Reception. Attesting to the …

MySQL database usage is popular in OpenStack. Core OpenStack services for Compute (Nova), Storage (Cinder), Neutron (Networking), Image (Glance) and Identity (Keystone) all use MySQL database.

MySQL – as the world’s most popular database, runs inside OpenStack Virtual Machines and serves as database backend to OpenStack cloud based applications. The MySQL instances can be configured to run in virtual machines manually (by simply installing MySQL inside a VM and running it) or can be created in an on-demand fashion by OpenStack Database-as-a-Service (Trove).

In either case, the MySQL data is mission-critical. OpenStack cloud administrators and cloud guests/tenants need the ability to backup and restore their MySQL databases. mysqldump is traditional way of doing MySQL backups and restores. However, based on previous experiences of the MySQL community, it is widely known that mysqldump has …

Founded in 1998, Rackspace has evolved over the years to address the way customers are using data – and more specifically, databases. The San Antonio-based company is fueling the adoption of cloud computing among organizations large and small.

Today Rackspace is doubling down on open source database technologies. Why? Because that’s where the industry is heading, according to Sean Anderson, Manager of Data Services at Rackspace. The company, he said, created a separate business unit of 100+ employees focused solely on database workloads.

The key technologies under the hood include both relational databases (e.g., MySQL, Percona Server, and MariaDB) and NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, Redis, and Apache Hadoop).

Last July Rackspace …

MySQL is the database of choice for most OpenStack components (Ceilometer is a notable exception). If you start with a small deployment, it will probably run like a charm. But as soon as the dataset grows, you will suddenly face several challenges. We will write a series of blog posts explaining the issues you may hit and how to overcome them.

Where is MySQL used in OpenStack?

Have a look at the logical diagram of OpenStack below (click the image for a larger view).

The diagram is a bit outdated: Neutron appears as Quantum and newer components like Heat are not pictured. But it shows that a database has to be used to store metadata or runtime information. And although …

Percona Server and Percona XtraDB Cluster provide high-performance alternatives for MySQL users. We have also seen rapidly growing interest in these solutions in the OpenStack community where higher performance and high availability are crucial. Many OpenStack users are adopting these solutions but we’ve also seen demand from companies creating OpenStack distros. For example, Percona XtraDB Cluster is now certified for the RHEL OSP (OpenStack Platform) and is included in the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release. …

September 17, 2014 By Severalnines

The Severalnines team is pleased to announce the release of ClusterControl 1.2.8. This release contains key new features along with performance improvements and bug fixes. We have outlined some of the key new features below. 

Highlights of ClusterControl 1.2.8 include:

• YUM/APT repositories for ClusterControl
• Deployment and scaling of single-node MySQL, MariaDB and MongoDB
• Alerts and incident tracking with PagerDuty 
• Unified Event Viewer
• New flexible alarms/email notification system
• Audit logging - Administrator activity tracking
• Global MySQL User Management
• New default dashboards for MySQL/MariaDB
• Puppet Module …

It's that time of the year again: yes, Oracle Open World is coming up and with that I'll be travelling to San Francisco. New for this year is that we are part of the main Open World event and therefore have our own MySQL Central. Here you will have the opportunity of meeting many of the engineers behind MySQL, discuss technical problems you have, and also learn some about how we look at the future of the MySQL ecosystem.

This year, me and Narayanan Venkateswaran will be presenting two sessions:

Elastic Scalability in MySQL Fabric with OpenStack (Thursday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM-2:00 PM in Moscone South, 252)

In this session you will see …

As many of you know I'm actively developing libAttachSQL and am rapidly heading towards the first beta release.  For those who don't, libAttachSQL is a lightweight C connector for MySQL servers with a non-blocking API.  I am developing it as part of my day job for HP's Advanced Technology Group.  It was in-part born out of my frustration when dealing with MySQL and eventlet in Python back when I was working on various Openstack projects.  But there are many reasons why this is a good thing for C/C++ applications as well.

What you may not know is I will be giving a talk about libAttachSQL, the technology behind it and the decisions we made to get here at  …