August 12, 2014 By Severalnines

Moodle is an open-source e-learning platform (aka Learning Management System) that is widely adopted by educational institutions to create and administer online courses. For larger student bodies and higher volumes of instruction, moodle must be robust enough to serve thousands of learners, administrators, content builders and instructors simultaneously. Availability and scalability are key requirements as moodle becomes a critical application for course providers. In this blog, we will show you how to deploy and cluster moodle/web, database and file-system components on multiple servers to achieve both high availability and scalability. 

We are going to deploy moodle on top of GlusterFS clustered file system and MariaDB Galera Cluster 10. To eliminate any single point of failure, we will use three nodes to serve the application and database while the remaining two are used for …

If you’ve used relational databases for more than ten minutes, I hope you’ve heard of slow queries. Those are those pesky little gremlins that are slowing down your startup, and preventing scalability you so desperately need. Luckily there’s a solution. What I’ve found is if I send a report to developers every week, it keeps […]

Join 25,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Are you serious about backups? If you’re just using Amazon EBS snapshots, that may not be sufficient. There’s a good chance it won’t protect you against your next data loss. That’s why I like to have a few different types of backups Also: 5 more […]

Apache Hadoop is commonly used for data analysis. It is fast for data loads and scalable. In a previous post I showed how to integrate MySQL with Hadoop. In this post I will show how to export a table from  MySQL to Hadoop, load the data to Cloudera Impala (columnar format) and run a reporting on top of that. For the examples below I will use the “ontime flight performance” data from my previous post (Increasing MySQL performance with parallel query execution). I’ve used the Cloudera Manager v.4 to install Apache Hadoop and Impala. For this test …

MaxScale is a Proxy for the MySQL protocol built with a modular architecture. The underlying concept of modules allows to extend the MaxScale proxy services. The current version implements Read Write splitting and Connection Load Balancing. Internally MySQL queries go through a SQL parsing phase. This gives MaxScale great capabilities regarding queries routing.

So if [...]

At FOSDEM 2014 ProxySQL and MaxScale were both presented. Both are proxy that can help build sophisticated MariaDB/MySQL architectures. But currently what is the most used proxy with MySQL? It is HAproxy. HAproxy is a level 4 proxy that has no knowledge of the MySQL protocol. Being low level makes it very fast but it [...]

In the last 10 years I have worked a lot with replication systems, and I have developed a keen interest in the topic of multiple masters in a single cluster. My interest has a two distinct origins:

• On one hand, I have interacted countless times with users who want to use a replication system as a drop-in replacement for a single server. In many cases, especially when users are dealing with applications that are not much flexible or modular, this means that the replication system must have several points of data entry, and such points must work independently and in symbiosis with the rest of the nodes.
• On the other hand, I am a technology lover (look it up in the dictionary: it is spelled geek), and as such I get my curiosity stirred whenever I discover a new possibility of implementing multi-master systems.

The double nature of this professional curiosity makes me sometimes forget that the …

I like the image of this city of Mesa Verde. It’s fascinating to see how ancient cities were built, especially as an inhabitant of one of the worlds largest cities today, New York. I’m a long time relational database guy. I worked at scores of dot-coms in the 90′s as an old-guard Oracle DBA, and […]

Join 12,100 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. 1. Covers databases broadly You may not have noticed, but there’s a whole spectrum of relational databases on offer. Of course in the database world, most get infatuated with one, and that becomes their bread & butter before long. Their life, their passion, their devotion. […]

The slides and replay of yesterday’s webinar on the MariaDB CONNECT storage engine have just been posted. First I want to thank the numerous attendees. You have shown great interest on the parallel execution of query on distributed MySQL Servers. I agree this is cool. The ODBC capabilities seems also to generate interest. This make [...]