The latest from the MySQL community

SPOF (i.e. Single Point of Failure) is the bane for technologists. Avoiding SPOF generally requires redundancy, and redundancy has a cost, often more then a business is prepared to pay. In the database field, I see this regularly and advise clients on how to improve availability and potential avoid disasters that can affect their business.

Today, at approximately 10:30am, the Con Edison work crew in front of my home (digging a 5″ deep trench down the road), severed multiple Time Warner Cable fibre connections. ($#&* and the lack of ownership to correct timely is another story). No Internet, no ability to work actively with clients (which I was doing), etc, etc.

As an individual that works from home, I have recognized this SPOF and have redundancy in place. That is, a Verizon MiFi HotSpot, normally used for travel, but a backup in times of Internet downtime to my home. The moral here is, one level of redundancy is often not …

On July 4 I gave two presentations at the OTN Tour Day, and on July 5 I have three presentations at the MySQL Training Days. This was my 3rd visit to Colombia and it was great to see a receptive audience. Thanks to Robin for organizing the events in 2010, 2011 and 2012.

You can download all presentations from the provided links.

• MySQL Backup and Recovery Essentials
• MySQL Security Essentials
• MySQL Performance Analysis Essentials
• …

The following are short interviews from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) event in Cali, Colombia. One with myself and another with Sheeri Cabral.

These Videos are sourced from OTN Tour Latin America 2012.

It’s been released. Use this with NIST::NVD 1.00.00 and you will be able to perform immediate look-ups of CVE and CWE data given a CPE URN. For instance:

cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl Makefile.PL ; make ; make test ; cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl -MNIST::NVD::Query -MData::Dumper -e '
$q = NIST::NVD::Query->new(store    => q{SQLite3},database => q{t/data/nvdcve-2.0.db});
$cve_list = $q->cve_for_cpe( cpe => q{cpe:/a:microsoft:ie:7.0.5730.11} );
print Data::Dumper::Dumper { cve_list => $cve_list, first_cvss => $q->cve( cve_id => $cve_list->[0] )->{q{vuln:cvss}} }
'
$VAR1 = {
          'cve_list' => [
                          'CVE-2002-2435',
                          'CVE-2010-5071'
                        ],
          'first_cvss' => {
                            'cvss:base_metrics' => { …

Percona is back for a second New York Percona Live Conference. As the resident New York MySQL Expert, I will again be presenting. My session will be on MySQL Backup and Recovery Essentials.

You can only present so much in one hour, and this presentation just touches on the highlights of what is possible. More detailed information about the right backup and recovery strategy and associated tools is available in my current book Effective MySQL: Backup and Recovery.

The following is an evaluation of various compression utilities that I tested when reviewing the various options for MySQL backup strategies. The overall winner in performance was pigz, a parallel implementation of gzip. If you use gzip today as most organizations do, this one change will improve your backup compression times.

Details of the test:

• The database is 5.4GB of data
• mysqldump produces a backup file of 2.9GB
• The server is an AWS t1.xlarge with a dedicated EBS volume for backups

The following testing was performed to compare the time and % compression savings of various available open source products. This was not an exhaustive test with multiple iterations and different types of data files.

I’m leaving myself some room for bug fixes. It works for us in house. I would love to help others to give it a try. especially those who could benefit from making nearly immediately answered queries to the NIST’s NVD database.

The code in this release cannot by itself track the feed from the feds in real time. The nvd entry loader needs a little bit of love in the area of record merging before this starts working. It’s on my TODO list.

I’m sorry for the outage of git.colliertech.org. I’ll get that back up here shortly. In the meantime, feel free to grab it from this location while the CPAN indexes and processes my submission.

http://www.colliertech.org/federal/NIST/NIST-NVD-1.00.00.tar.bz2

don’t forget to check the cryptographic signature:

…

A new company often means new responsibilities and learning new ways of doing things. For a tech guy, it often means picking up a new framework or maybe if you are a glutton for punishment, a new language. I recently switched OSes, languages, and databases as a DBA/DB Developer. This was quite a massive shift for me. I went from the stable, enterprise database, SQL Server, to the little engine that could, MySQL. Before the switch, I would stew over the fact that SQL Server lacked features in comparison to Oracle or Postgres, but now I realize that there are far better things to worry about (such as non-blocking backups). I just wanted to go over some of the differences I found.

1. MySQL is a collection of binaries that manipulate data files. It is not a monolithic application that persists its data to disk, but instead it allows another process to manipulate its files even while it’s running. It interprets a folder in its data directory …

I want to propose something that’s mere imagination at this point. There’s a lot of promises made by database vendors whether closed or open source that they have created an RDBMS that can scale across nodes, making a data storage service that can expand with user needs as well as deal with hardware failures. We have the traditional players:

• Oracle has RAC
• MySQL has their cluster product
• Postgres has synchronous replication
• SQL Server has replication and fail-over clustering

The sad truth is this: none of these are fully there yet. Most of them trade the ability to transparently scale and fail over for availability. These solutions do not require major application refactoring. Oracle RAC has a shared disk, which means no IO scaling and a single point of failure (SPF). MySQL Cluster has heterogeneous nodes (although you can remove all SPFs), and it does not perform foreign key …

At the recent South East LinuxFest in June 2012 I gave two MySQL presentations.

The first was on Explaining the MySQL Explain. This presentation details the MySQL Query Execution Plan (QEP) of an SQL statement and how to understand and interpret the information from the EXPLAIN command. Also discussed are additional commands and tools that exist to add supplementary information. These are essential skills that will be used daily in production operations. Download Presentation (PDF)

More detailed information about EXPLAIN and associated commands is available …