I have a customer who is considering Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a two colo WAN environment.  They wanted me to do a test comparing PXC against semi-synchronous replication to see how they stack up against each other.

Test Environment

The test environment included AWS EC2 nodes in US-East and US-West (Oregon).  The ping RTT latency between these nodes was right around 100ms.

All environments used Percona Server or Percona XtraDB Cluster server 5.5.24.  Innodb durability was disabled for all tests (innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2).  All other settings were the same kept the same unless otherwise noted.

I tested against the following setups:

Control

The control …

Some time ago I finally had the chance to test the built-in load balancing feature in MySQL's JDBC driver together with a 3 node Galera cluster. I have used this feature at a MySQL Cluster customer many years ago, so I knew it worked and I knew it was great, but I didn't know if it would work with Galera. Galera sometimes returns some error states that are different from what MySQL Cluster does and the main point of the test was to see how the loadbalancing in the JDBC driver reacts to that.

read more

On Thursday I went to the Harmony conference arranged by Oracle User Group Finland to speak about Galera clustering. (They chose the topic based on my suggestions.) The slides are now available on SlideShare. I'm pretty satisfied with this talk myself, the slides contain the most important steps you need to know to get started, but also the internal architecture of Galera, how it works, and what kind of replication topologies and load balancing you would want to use with it. And benchmarks of course.

read more

Heli from Oracle User Group Finland invited me to speak at this years OUGF Harmony conference which starts tomorrow. Last year I had some proposals accepted but had to decline due to work travel.

This year they wanted to learn more about Galera and I was of course more than happy to go and speak. My talk is titled "Synchronous Multi-Master Clusters with MySQL: an Introduction to Galera." It contains some parts of what we presented at the MySQL Conference, but is more of an introduction and less about benchmarking.

read more

This post is about a fairly technical detail of how Galera works. I'm writing it down in preparation for testing this feature so that I can agree with Alex whether to file a bug or not. I'm sharing it on my blog just in case someone else might benefit from learning this.

Galera 2.0 introduces rolling schema upgrades. This is a new way to do non-blocking schema changes in MySQL.

As the name suggests, it is done as a rolling upgrade. Having seen clusters doing rolling upgrades before, I assumed this is what happens:

• Execute alter table on Node 1.
• Node 1 is removed from the cluster and stops processing transactions.
• Node 1 completes alter table.
• Node 1 re-joins cluster and catches up so that it is in sync.

read more

Alex Yurchenko finally posted results on a benchmark he has planned to do for a long time: Galera vs NDB cloud shootout.

Their blog requires registration to comment, so I'll post my comment here instead:

***

Sysbench can do the loadbalancing itself, so there is no need for external loadbalancer. Just add a comma separated list of master MySQL nodes to --mysql-host. This is similar to what the JDBC and PHP drivers can do too, and it is my favorite architecture. Why introduce extra layers of stuff that you don't need and that doesn't bring any additional value?

read more

Oli Sennhauser of FromDual.

Synchronous multi-master replication with the Galera plugin. Your application connects to the load balancer and it redirects read/write traffic to the various MySQL Galera nodes. Tested a setup with 17 SQL nodes and you can have even more. Scaling reads and also a little bit for scaling writes is what Galera is good for.

If one node fails, the other two nodes still communicates with each other and the load balancer is aware of the failed node.

Why Galera? There is master-slave replication but its not multi-master, and its asynchronous and you can get inconsistencies. There is master-master replication but its asynchronous and can have inconsistencies and conflicts if you write on both nodes. MHA/MMM/Tungsten are not providing new technology but are based on the MySQL replication technology. …

Just wanted to say I'm so happy: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/01/09/announcement-of-percona-x...

And also that this is a significant moment in the evolution of MySQL - things will never be the same again.

I've been promising I should re-visit once more the disk bound sysbench tests I ran on Galera. In December I finally had some lab time to do that. If you remember what troubled me then it was that in all my other Galera benchmarks performance with Galera was equal or much better compared to performance on a single MySQL node. (And this is very unusual wrt high availability solutions, usually they come with a performance penalty. This is why Galera is so great.) However, on the tests with a disk bound workload, there was performance degradation, and what was even more troubling was the performance seemed to decrease more when adding more write masters.

In these tests I was able to understand the performance decrease and it had nothing to do with Galera and not even …

Here are the slides to my first talk at Percona Live UK 2011: Choosing a MySQL High Availability solution.1

1. 1. See this for a review of the conference as a whole: http://openlife.cc/blogs/2011/october/thanks-percona-and-attendees-great-percona-live-uk-2011

read more