I’ve been doing some prototyping work to see how suitable MongoDB is for replacing a small (in number, not size) cluster of MySQL servers. The motivation for looking at MongoDB in this role is that we need a flexible and reliable document store that can handle sharding, a small but predictable write volume (1.5 – 2.0 million new documents daily), light indexing, and map/reduce operations for heavier batch queries. Queries to fetch individual documents aren’t that common–let’s say 100/sec in aggregate at peak times.

What I’ve done so far is to create a set of Perl libraries that abstract away the data I need to store and provide a “backend” interface to which I can plug in a number of modules for talking to different data stores (including some “dummy” ones for testing and debugging). This has helped to clarify some …

It is critical that you do not use the default MySQL installation security, it’s simply insecure.

Default Installation

When installed, MySQL enables any user with physical permissions to the server to connect to the MySQL via unauthenticated users. MySQL also provides complete access to all super user privileges via the ‘root’ user with no default password.

$ mysql -uroot
mysql> SELECT host,user,password FROM mysql.user;
+--------------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| host         | user | password                                  |
+--------------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| localhost    | root |                                           |
| server.local | root |                                           |
| 127.0.0.1    | root |                                           |
| localhost    |      |                                           |
| server.local |      | …

Multi-byte characters can cause quite a few problems for the unsuspecting DBA or web master. Most of the times all you need to do to figure out how to fix the problem is detect which database records have UTF-8 data in them. Scanning records manually is not an option. Try the following query to find strings with multi-byte [...]

Next development release 0.1.4 of MySQL Connector/Python is now available for download. This will be the last in the 0.1-series as we move on to 0.2. The aim is to release more often to get to v1.0. Hurray!

Highlights:

• Reading from network was broken for bigger packages.
• Reimplementing protocol.MySQLProtocol marking simpler and easier to maintain.
• It is now possible to send multiple statements to MySQL using MySQLCursor.execute(). The results are accessible by calling the method next_resultset().
• MySQLCursor.callproc() will now store all result sets as a MySQLCursorBuffered. They are accessible using the next_proc_resultset() method. The result of the stored procedure is returned by callproc() itself as defined by PEP249.
• MySQL …

MySQL 5.1.47

In addition to the security update, MySQL 5.1.47 is also very important for an additional reason. The InnoDB plugin that ships with this version has been updated to 1.0.8, which is …

Since we started work on MariaDB, the drop in replacement for MySQL, there has been a LOT of confusion about MariaDB the database versus Maria the storage engine.

Thus, Monty Program is running a “Rename Maria” contest. Click that shiny, beckoning link for more information.

As an incentive to click that link, the prize is a spiffy Meerkat NetTop computer from our friends at System76!

The contest runs through May 31, so jump-start that clever brain of yours and send in your suggestions!

Here’s a somewhat shorter post than the last just to give an update on what’s been happening at Monty Program.

As I said in a previous post, we had a company meeting in Reykjavik in late February. Fortunately, geological hiccups only started after we left.

About a month later the entire company was reunited at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference. Monty Program was a platinum sponsor of the event, as we stepped forward to ensure the conference happened when it seemed likely that Sun/Oracle would not be doing so. To their credit, Oracle came through in the end, and sponsored the conference.

As usual, the annual O’Reilly MySQL conference was a whirlwind of activity. Monty Program employees (myself included) were well represented on the speaker’s list. Monty himself gave an …

In February of this year the first -STABLE release of MariaDB was pushed out the door! Based on MySQL 5.1, MariaDB 5.1.42 has seen incremental point releases since the initial drop. Currently MariaDB 5.1.44b is our -STABLE release, and is available from the Monty Program website as well as all our mirrors. Debian and RedHat packages are available for most popular architectures.

This initial release incorporates a lot of community patches, bugfixes, new storage engine options and some new features. With MariaDB 5.1.4x you now have XtraDB, PBXT and FederatedX as optional storage engines. There are extended statistics for slow query logs. We have optimized table elimination, a pool of threads feature and enhancement, and much more. For a complete breakdown on what’s new, be sure to read the …

Wow, it’s May! Time has flown.

It has been a while since I gave an update on MariaDB progress and what we’re doing at Monty Program, and so there’s a lot to catch up on!

In February the employees of Monty Program had a company meeting in Reykjavik. This was prior to the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, so if you were affected by the eruption, I guess you can blame us.

In April we attended the O’Reilly MySQL Conference, where many employees gave talks and others staffed our booth in the Expo Hall.

At the end of April my wife and I took a (well-deserved) 10 day vacation in the Dominican Republic. It was a much needed battery recharge.

I mention these events because I was responsible for planning them in the first two cases, and offline for the third. …

Web Operations

Web Operations. By John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins, O’Reilly 2010. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site).

This book is due out in about a month. It is part of O’Reilly’s Beautiful series, which you might know through Beautiful Code. This one’s about web ops, of course. There are a dozen contributors, including some of my favorites such as Theo Schlossnagle, whose …