In California we are always thinking about backups.   Living near an earthquake fault line makes this necessary.  For me, it is the Hayward Fault (it runs from goal post to goal post  in University of Californa Berkeley stadium).  We are strongly advised to have backup systems for water, food, and medical emergencies.  It’s necessary to monitor your food and water emergency …

I’d like to focus this blog on using MySQL in the Enterprise and kickoff with a series of posts on “Enterprise Backup” building on the new features in both MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB) and MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM).  The new features in MEB 3.6 provide the capabilities to stream backups directly to another server, interface with backup media management software, and take advantage of tape encryption.  MEM 2.3.5 now has a Backup Advisor that helps monitor your backups.  In this and a subsequent  blog post, I’ll go through a progression of backups building up on a fairly straightforward vanilla single file backup with MEB as follows:

• Backing up to a Single File
• Add streaming to your Single File backup
• Stream your Single File Backup to a Media Management System
• Encrypt your Backup Tapes using your Media Management System
• Monitoring your Backup with MySQL …

It's the second point release of MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.3. And there some nice new features and bugfixes.

It's now possible to enable or disable event blackout for specific servers easily.

It should now graph InnoDB with multiple buffer pools correctly. It won't work for 5.5.8 however, see Bug #60777 and Bug #60831 for more info on that.

Read the complete changelogs for all the details.

The Advisors/Rules were also updated. But there is still room for improvement:

• Bug #60828 Add rule to detect duplicate foreign keys
• …

Nowadays MySQL Databases are encapsulated into many mission critical software solutions. Lots of companies host one or many MySQL databases in their data center, sometimes even without knowing it except when the MySQL service is no more available. In order to increase this service availability it is mandatory to have a monitoring solution. Regardles of you are using MySQL Server, MySQL replication or cluster the Oracle/MySQL monitoring solution is called MySQL Enterprise Monitor.

The recording of this webinar is now available to view on-line here.

There will be a live webinar on Wednesday January 12 describing the new ways that you can manage MySQL Cluster (with a bit of monitoring thrown in). As always, the webinar is free but you need to register here. The event is scheduled for 09:00 Pacific / 17:00 UK / 18:00 Central European time but if you can’t make the live webinar it’s still worth registering so that you’re emailed the replay after the event.

By their very nature, clustered environments involve more effort and resource to administer than standalone systems, and the same is true of MySQL Cluster, the database designed for web-scale throughput with carrier-grade availability.

In this webinar, we will present an …

Clustered computing brings with it many benefits: high performance, high availability, scalable infrastructure, etc.  But it also brings with it more complexity.

Why ?  Well, by its very nature, there are more "moving parts" to monitor and manage (from physical, virtual and logical hosts) to fault detection and failover software to redundant networking components - the list goes on.  And a cluster that isn't effectively provisioned and managed will cause more downtime than the standalone systems it is designed to improve upon.  Not so great....

When it comes to the database industry, analysts already estimate that 50% of a typical database's Total Cost of Ownership is attributable to staffing and downtime costs.  These costs will only increase if a database cluster is to hard to properly administer.

Over the past 9 months, monitoring and management has been a major focus in the …

Clustered computing brings with it many benefits: high performance, high availability, scalable infrastructure, etc.  But it also brings with it more complexity.

Why ?  Well, by its very nature, there are more "moving parts" to monitor and manage (from physical, virtual and logical hosts) to fault detection and failover software to redundant networking components - the list goes on.  And a cluster that isn't effectively provisioned and managed will cause more downtime than the standalone systems it is designed to improve upon.  Not so great....

When it comes to the database industry, analysts already estimate that 50% of a typical database's Total Cost of Ownership is attributable to staffing and downtime costs.  These costs will only increase if a database cluster is to hard to properly administer.

Over the past 9 months, monitoring and management has been a major focus in the …

MySQL Enterprise Monitor with MySQL Cluster

A few months ago, I posted a walkthrough of how to extend MySQL Enterprise Monitor in order to monitor MySQL Cluster. The great news is that as of MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.3 (available from Oracle E-Delivery since 1st November) this functionality is included in the core product and so there is no need to add the extra features in manually. Of course, that post might still be of interest if you want to further extend MySQL Enterprise Monitor.

This post briefly steps through the new (Cluster-specific) functionality but if you’re interested, why not try it for yourself and download the new …

In the last post, we saw how to create a test OpenLDAP server, populate it and secure it with SSL certificates. Now we are going to have a look at how to configure MySQL Enterprise Manager (MEM) to authenticate against LDAP. We will be examining a few different kinds of setup methods.

1. Using LDAP to fetch just the user password

The simplest form is to configure a user with MEM and set it to the LDAP type. The user’s role is setup in MEM during user creation time and is not fetched from LDAP. Below you can see the user definition page:

How to create a LDAP user in MEM - password only

The username is user1 as specified in MEM, but where do we get the password …

The latest 2.2 release of MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) has the ability to authenticate against LDAP. I decided to test this setup and for that, I had to create and populate an OpenLDAP server, including STARTTLS/SSL certificates. This guide was done on CentOS 5.5 but it shouldn’t be much different in other Linux/Unix distributions. First, start off by installing the packages with:

root@shell> yum install openldap openldap-clients openldap-servers

Then head to /etc/openldap where you can set you domain and the DN for the LDAP manager user. I’ve inserted some useful comments into the slapd.conf file. Lines without comments have not been changed from the default slapd.conf file.

shell> grep -v "^#" /etc/openldap/slapd.conf | grep -v "^$"
include         /etc/openldap/schema/core.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/cosine.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/inetorgperson.schema
include …