#DBHangOps for 6/26/13 is all done! Check out the recording below:

Hey everybody!

#DBHangOps is back this week at a slightly earlier time this Wednesday, June 26th, 2013 at 11:00am paciifc (18:00 GMT) . We’ll have special guest Shlomi Noach talking about the open source tools he’s developed to improve a DBA’s day-to-day work.

Be sure to check out the #DBHangops twitter search, the DBHangops Twitter Feed, or this blog post to get a link for the google hangout on Wednesday!

Thanks and see all of you there!

It's my great pleasure to announce the release of mylvmbackup version 0.14.

This release includes a large number of improvements, code cleanups, and new functionality.

I would like to thank Ask Bjørn Hansen, Ben Bonnel, Norbert Tretkowski, Neil Wilson, Klaus Ethgen and Alexandre Anriot for their feedback and contributions to this release.

The release is available as a source tarball and generic RPM package. Packages for other distributions are available from the openSUSE Build Service.

Some notable highlights from the …

Annnd all set! Check out the recording for the topics below:

Hello everyone!

We missed out on the last meeting time for #DBHangOps due to some conflicts, but we’re looking to come back strong this Wednesday, June 12th 2013 at 12:00pm pacific (19:00 GMT). Come join the discussion and contribute your experience on:

• Upgrading to MySQL 5.6
  • Any issues or gotchas?
• MySQL Python Utilities
  • How do you use them?
• MySQL patches
  • Patches you use
  • Patches you want
• Interesting or valuable Linux kernel settings

Be sure to check out the #DBHangops twitter search, the DBHangops Twitter …

A fascinating post-mortem on high profile network failures:

This post is meant as a reference point–to illustrate that, according to a wide range of accounts, partitions occur in many real-world environments. Processes, servers, NICs, switches, local and wide area networks can all fail, and the resulting economic consequences are real. Network outages can suddenly arise in systems that are stable for months at a time, during routine upgrades, or as a result of emergency maintenance. The consequences of these outages range from increased latency and temporary unavailability to inconsistency, corruption, and data loss. Split-brain is not an academic concern: it happens to all kinds of systems–sometimes for days on end. Partitions deserve serious consideration.

Towards the end of last year, I was asked to investigate the Red Hat Software Collections by someone that popped by one of my talks. SkySQL has been working heavily with Red Hat, and with Fedora 19 shipping MariaDB as a default, it seems like MariaDB is getting even more distribution. The Red Hat Software Collections 1.0 Beta is now available for users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

From a database standpoint, users now get MariaDB 5.5. I encourage all to try it, as it is an in-situ upgrade. It is described as:

MariaDB version 5.5, which introduces an easy-to-adopt alternative for MySQL for Red Hat Enterprise …

How-To configure your MySQL to use PAM and/or Active Directory authentication with percona-pam-authentication plugin. Continuing articles about Two-Factor authentication or integrating Linux services with Active Directory, this How-To is one of my recent works that I have done these days, so I hope it may help the community with this guide to configure MySQL with PAM and subsequently using Active Directory to authenticate. If you are new here, please refer to SSH Two-Factor authentication, which explains how to install likewise and integrate your Linux with AD. However, we will have few exceptions to get MySQL working with PAM authentication.

Before you continue, please make sure that you have MySQL 5.5.16 or a newer version, otherwise it can …

Backups is one of the most important part of any MySQL deployment, and nowadays, there’s a number of tools to choose from depending on how your organization implements them. The purpose of this post is to enumerate the main tools and some helpers that makes backing up and testing/restoring your backups more convenient. By all means this is not the complete list, I’m sure I am missing some, so feel free to add them through the comments.

The Core Tools

• mysqldump – is a logical backup tool for MySQL. It creates plain text files with SQL statements which you can directly import back to the server. Some would say mysqldump is not really a backup tool as you cannot get a consistent backup without disrupting operations while the server is running. I’d say this is just a limitation, if your dataset is small …

I am currently working with a large customer and I am involved with servers located in two data centers, one with Solaris servers and the other one with Linux servers. The Solaris side is cleverly setup using zones and ZFS and this provides a very low virtualization overhead. I learned quite a lot about these technologies while looking at this, thanks to Corey Mosher.

On the Linux side, we recently deployed a pair on servers for backup purpose, boxes with 64 300GB SAS drives, 3 raid controllers and 192GB of RAM. These servers will run a few slave instances each of production database servers and will perform the backups.  The write load is not excessive so a single server can easily handle the write load of all the MySQL instances.  The original idea was to configure them with raid-10 + LVM, making sure to …

tl;dr:
Make sure you flash an LSI-9211 to IT firmware rev#14 to get it to work 
with Linux and SSD trim.  You may have to downgrade from newer firmware
to older firmware to get the card to work.

Finding a SATA III controller with more than one PCI-e lane
After a recent hardware issue I decided to upgrade my computer to use new Intel 520 120MB SSD drives in RAID for improved performance.  The motherboard I use (an ASUS Rampage III extreme) has a Marvel SATA III controller with two ports, but I discovered that it is connected via only a single PCI-e lane (each lane can do at most 400MB/sec*).  This means that it can't effectively support even a single Intel 520 because one device can saturate the SATA III bus (An Intel 520 is rated at up to 550MB/sec sequential write).

So I went on a quest for a new SATA 3 controller.   To Frys! I exclaimed.  But unfortunately, all the PCI-e 2.x SATA III …

tl;dr:
Make sure you flash an LSI-9211 to IT firmware rev#14 to get it to work 
with Linux and SSD trim.  You may have to downgrade from newer firmware
to older firmware to get the card to work.

Finding a SATA III controller with more than one PCI-e lane
After a recent hardware issue I decided to upgrade my computer to use new Intel 520 120MB SSD drives in RAID for improved performance.  The motherboard I use (an ASUS Rampage III extreme) has a Marvel SATA III controller with two ports, but I discovered that it is connected via only a single PCI-e lane (each lane can do at most 400MB/sec*).  This means that it can't effectively support even a single Intel 520 because one device can saturate the SATA III bus (An Intel 520 is rated at up to 550MB/sec sequential write).

So I went on a quest for a new SATA 3 controller.   To Frys! I exclaimed.  But unfortunately, all the PCI-e 2.x SATA III …