The latest from the MySQL community

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in last week’s webinar on 'Galera Cluster for MySQL vs MySQL (NDB) Cluster: A High Level Comparison'. 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 VP of Products, Alex Yu, who was part of the team at Ericsson who originally developed the NDB storage engine in 2001, gave an overview of the two clustering architectures and discussed their respective strengths and weaknesses: 

1. MySQL Cluster architecture: strengths and limitations
2. Galera Architecture: strengths and limitations
3. Deployment scenarios
4. Data migration
5. Read and write workloads (Optimistic/pessimistic locking)
6. WAN/Geographical replication
7. Schema changes
8. Management and monitoring …

Introducing Consul

I’m always interested in what Mitchell Hashimoto and Hashicorp are up to, I typically find their projects valuable.  If you’ve heard of Vagrant, you know their work.

I recently became interested in a newer project they have called ‘Consul‘.  Consul is a bit hard to describe.  It is (in part):

• Highly consistent metadata store (a bit like Zookeeeper)
• A monitoring system (lightweight Nagios)
• A service discovery system, both DNS and HTTP-based. (think of something like haproxy, but instead of tcp load balancing, it provides dns lookups with healthy services)

What this has to do with Percona XtraDB Cluster

I’ve had some more complex testing for  …

One new feature in Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in recent releases was the inclusion of the ability for an existing cluster to auto-bootstrap after an all-node-down event.  Suppose you lose power on all nodes simultaneously or something else similar happens to your cluster. Traditionally, this meant manually re-bootstrapping the cluster, but not any more.

How it works

Given the above all-down situation, if all nodes are able to restart and see each other such that they all agree what the state was and that all nodes have returned, then the nodes will make a decision that it is safe for them to recover PRIMARY state as a whole.

This requires:

• All nodes went down hard — that is; a kill -9, kernel panic, server power failure, or similar event
• All nodes from the last PRIMARY component are restarted …

This post is a follow-up to my November 19 webinar, “Tips from the Trenches: A Guide to Preventing Downtime for the Over-Extended DBA,” during which I described some of the most common reasons DBAs experience avoidable downtime. The session was aimed at the “over-stretched DBA,” identified as the MySQL DBA short of time or an engineer of another discipline without the depth of the MySQL system. The over-stretched DBA may be prone to making fundamental mistakes that cause downtime through poor response time, operations that cause blocking on important data or administrative mishaps through the lack of best practice monitoring and alerting. (You can download my slides and view the recorded webinar here.)

Monitor the things
One of the aides to keeping the system up and …

Even if a Galera node looks like a regular MySQL server, the underlying replication mechanism is very different. This implies some changes in the way you have to configure the Galera nodes. Here are some of the most common misconceptions about Galera when using Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Q: Why should I enable binary logging as it is not needed by Galera replication?
Unlike for regular asynchronous MySQL replication, it is true that you don’t need to enable binary logging to use Galera replication. However what if someone runs an accidental DROP TABLE?

In this case, the statement will be replicated immediately on all nodes. Then your main option to recover lost data is to use a backup. But if binary logging is not …

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 …

This blog post was inspired by my visit at the annual Zabbix Conference in Riga, Latvia this year, where I gave a couple of talks on MySQL and beyond.

It was a two day single-track event with some 200 participants, a number of interesting talks on Zabbix (and related technologies) and really well-organized evening activities. I was amazed how well organized the event was and hope to be invited to speak there next year as well.   (Just in case you’re not sure what Zabbix is, it is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution for networks and applications)

I must secretly confess, it was also the first conference …

From left: Liz van Dijk, Frédéric Descamps and Kenny Gryp

If you’re following this blog, it’s quite likely you’re already aware of the Percona Live London 2014 conference coming up in just a few days. Just in case, though (you know, if you’re still looking for an excuse to sign up), I wanted to put a spotlight on the tutorial to be delivered by my esteemed colleagues Frédéric Descamps (@lefred) and Kenny Gryp (@gryp), and …

I reckon there’s little sense in running 2 or more Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) nodes in a single physical server other than for educational and testing purposes – but doing so is still useful in those cases. The most popular way of achieving this seems to be with server virtualization, such as making use of Vagrant boxes. But in the same way you can have multiple instances of MySQL running in parallel on the OS level in the form of concurrent mysqld processes, so too can you have multiple Percona XtraDB Cluster nodes. And the way to achieve this is precisely the same: using dedicated datadirs and different ports for each node.

Which ports?4 tcp ports are used by Pecona …

Normally, when we want to start PXC (Percona XtraDB Cluster) on RHEL/CentOS 6 or older then that, we can simply start with init.d script or service command. i.e

shell> /etc/init.d/mysql start 
OR 
shell> /etc/init.d/mysql bootstrap-pxc

shell> service mysql start.

But, the way is changed from CentOS 7. Because systemd integration with RHEL/CentOS 7 is now available for Percona XtraDB Cluster (#1342223).

So now, we have to start mysql with systemctl command i.e

shell> systemctl start mysql

For boostrap,

shell> systemctl start mysql@bootstrap.service

I would also suggest to read one very informative post by Przemek for recovering PXC cluster. …