The latest from the MySQL community

I was fortunate to attend an Ops discussion about databases at the OpenStack Summit Atlanta this past May as one of the panelists. The discussion was about deadlock issues OpenStack operators see with Percona XtraDB Cluster (of course this is applicable to any Galera-based solution). I asked to describe what they are seeing, and as it turned out, nova and neutron uses the SELECT … FOR UPDATE SQL construct quite heavily. This is a topic I thought was worth writing about.

Write set replication in a nutshell (with oversimplification)

Any node is writable, and replication happens in write sets. A write …

A common migration path from standalone MySQL/Percona Server to a Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) environment involves some measure of time where one node in the new cluster has been configured as a slave of the production master that the cluster is slated to replace. In this way, the new cluster acts as a slave of the production environment – traditional replication takes care of getting the data into the cluster, and then Galera replication handles the intra-cluster traffic. This often works without issue, although there is one case that I’ve encountered recently where special care must be taken to properly configure the stream to ensure that replication does not break. If you use multi-valued inserts with auto-increment columns, then this post is for you.

For purposes of our discussion, assume that we have a basic 3-node PXC cluster that we’ve set up …

When a write query is sent to Percona XtraDB Cluster all the nodes store the writeset on a file called gcache. By default the name of that file is galera.cache and it is stored in the MySQL datadir. This is a very important file, and as usual with the most important variables in MySQL, the default value is not good for high-loaded servers. Let’s see why it’s important and how can we calculate a correct value for the workload of our cluster.

What’s the gcache?
When a node goes out of the cluster (crash or maintenance) it obviously stops receiving changes. When you try to reconnect the node to the cluster the data will be outdated. The joiner node needs to ask a donor to send the changes happened during the downtime.

The donor …

Percona is glad to announce the new release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5 on September 5th 2014. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories.

Based on Percona Server 5.5.39-36.0 including all the bug fixes in it, Galera Replicator 2.11, and on …

Join me online next week (September 10 at 10 a.m. PDT) for my live webinar on Migrating to Percona XtraDB Cluster.  This was a popular webinar that I gave a few years ago, so I’m doing it again with updates for Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 (PXC) and all the latest in the Galera world.

This webinar will be really good for people interested in getting an overview of what PXC/Galera is, what it would take to adopt it for your application, and some of the differences and challenges it brings compared with a conventional MySQL Master/slave setup.  I’d highly suggest attending if you are considering Galera in your environment …

Percona is glad to announce the new release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 on September 1st 2014. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories.

Based on Percona Server 5.6.20-68.0 including all the bug fixes in it, Galera Replicator 3.7, and on …

Galera replication for MySQL brings not only the new, great features to our ecosystem, but also introduces completely new maintenance techniques. Are you concerned about adding such new complexity to your MySQL environment? Perhaps that concern is unnecessarily.

I am going to present here some simple tips that hopefully will let fresh Galera users prevent headaches when there is the need to recover part or a whole cluster in certain situations. I used Percona XtraDB Cluster (project based on Percona Server and Galera library + MySQL extensions from Codership) to prepare this post, but most if not all of the scenarios should also apply to any solution based on MySQL+Galera tandem you actually chose, whether these are binaries from Codership, MariaDB Galera Cluster or …

I was talking with a Percona Support customer earlier this week who was looking for Galera data on Percona Cloud Tools. (Percona Cloud Tools, now in free beta, is a hosted service providing access to query performance insights for all MySQL uses.)

The customer mentioned they were already keeping track of some Galera stats on Cacti, and given they were inclined to use Percona Cloud Tools more and more, they wanted to know if it was already supporting Percona XtraDB Cluster. My answer was: “No, not yet: you can install agents in each node (the regular way in the first node, then …

I was talking with a Percona Support customer earlier this week who was looking for Galera data on Percona Cloud Tools. (Percona Cloud Tools, now in free beta, is a hosted service providing access to query performance insights for all MySQL uses.)

The customer mentioned they were already keeping track of some Galera stats on Cacti, and given they were inclined to use Percona Cloud Tools more and more, they wanted to know if it was already supporting Percona XtraDB Cluster. My answer was: “No, not yet: you can install agents in each node (the regular way in the first node, then …

In a previous post, my colleague Dimitri Vanoverbeke discussed at a high level the concepts of database as a service (DBaaS), OpenStack and OpenStack’s implementation of a DBaaS, Trove. Today I’d like to delve a bit further into Trove and discuss where it fits in, and who benefits.

Just to recap, Trove is OpenStack’s implementation of a database as a service for its cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And as the mission statement declares, the Trove project seeks to provide a scalable and reliable cloud database service providing functionality for both relational and non-relational database engines. With the current release of Icehouse, the technology has begun to show maturity providing both stability and a rich feature set.

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