MySQL doesn’t often crash, but, if you use MySQL on a production system you should have High Availability.

Maybe you’ve not heard of MHA.  Yoshinori Matsunobu only released it in July of this year (2011).  I’ve been reviewing it and I think you should too. There are a lot of people chasing after this “holy grail” and most systems are complex and / or hard to recover when they fail. MHA simple and easy to use.

MHA is a fail over tool. It’s designed to fail a master and promote a slave to a new master. (This is simply to say but you should read how it’s done.) It can monitor your master or you can manually fail over.  Failing …

In last weeks OurSQL postcast (episode 65)  Sheeri,  Sarah and Jerry talked about making MySQL safe with SSL.  Encryption always seems to be such a confusing subject. I think every database should be using SSL by default.  So, I was wondering just how easily SSL could be setup.

Most existing examples I found  setup SSL authentication and encryption.  If you are handling  PCI DSS or HIPAA data you must encrypt the data on the wire, but passwords are …

I ask Sheeri of the OurSQL podcast to publish her list of MySQL websites and podcasts she follows. I thought it was only fair I do the same.  If you don’t watch these all the time your missing out. I read most of these every week.

If I missed one please leave a comment.

Planet MySQL – http://planet.mysql.com/  - This is the big community list of MySQL info.  Not all my list is found here.
OurMySQL - http://www.oursqlcast.com/ – This a THE podcast for MySQL.  New shows each week.
Sergey Petrunia’s blog – http://s.petrunia.net/blog/
clever elephant – http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/
…

This is more boring parts but you must lay a good foundation.

MySQL Setup:

All the resources must be in place before you configure Pacemaker. The default location for MySQL data is /var/lib/mysql.  You will be moving this to the DRBD file system in /data/mysql.   The default MySQL configuration is in /etc/my.cnf.  I move it to /data/mysql so updates will move with system fail overs.   To keep life simple I use sym-links to point from /var/lib/mysql and /etc/my.cnf to their new locations.
Install MySQL of your choise on DB1, DB2 and DB3.

# rpm -Uhv http://www.percona.com/downloads/percona-release/percona-release-0.0-1.x86_64.rpm
# yum -y install Percona-Server-server-51.x86_64 Percona-Server-client-51.x86_64 \
 Percona-Server-shared-51.x86_64 xtrabackup.x86_64
# service mysql start
# mysql -e "CREATE FUNCTION fnv1a_64 RETURNS INTEGER …

I’ve never objected to someone making money from MySQL. I’ve only expressed disappointment that they weren’t doing it effectively enough. As I have predicted many times, Oracle is good at this. Oracle is the number one reason I didn’t start a new career in some other database a few years ago. Oracle is making MySQL more successful not only for Oracle, but also for the users, the community, and the competition.

I am glad that Oracle is offering more pay-only extensions to the server in a way that creates opportunities for others to do the same, and I look forward to even more of them in the future.

Further Reading:

• …

Installing DRDB in CentOS 5.6.

In Part 1 I when through the process of preparing a number of CentOS 5.6 servers. Now make the services they’ll preform more stable.

High Availability (HA)

I’ll be presenting two ways to provide redundant data and high available services. First, Pacemaker – with DRDB will duplicate your data at the disk partition level and watch for failures. Should the hardware failure, Pacemaker will take all the needed steps to start MySQL on the Hot Stand By (HSB). This is not perfect. Should someone run ‘rm *’ or drop a database DRDB will duplicate the loss on the HSB.

In another part, I’ll use …

It’s notoriously hard to measure the usage of open-source software. Software that’s open-source or free can be redistributed far and wide, so the original creators have no idea how many times it’s installed, deployed, or distributed. As a proxy, we often use downloads, but that’s woefully inadequate.

I’ve recently begun trying to figure out how many job openings are mentioning various open-source projects. I think that this might be a better metric because it’s driven by the end result (usage), rather than intermediate processes (downloads, etc). I think that it’s likely that usage and demand for skilled people is somewhat realistically related.

To be more concrete, I’ve been watching RSS feeds from job posting aggregators for several alternative versions of MySQL: Percona Server, MariaDB, and Drizzle. It appears that Percona Server is by far the most in-demand in terms of job skills. (I haven’t seen a job posting …

People keep asking me “what is going to happen to MySQL now that Oracle has screwed MySQL?” I bluntly disagree that any such thing has happened. This blog post is just my personal view and does not reflect my employer’s opinion, but Oracle might have saved MySQL from what I can see. There is no evidence that supports the hysterical doomsday theories. (Witness MySQL 5.5, probably the best MySQL release in history. Not exactly what I’d call “screwing.”)

I believe that a product with such a large, diverse, and important market presence needs a variety of companies involved with it in many different ways. One of the absolutely key things is a company to make money from it. MySQL needs Oracle, because no one else involved is both capable and trying to make MySQL, the product, a large-scale commercial success. It looks like Oracle is doing what I wish Sun could have done.

Now, is Oracle going to be community friendly, …

Opps… What happens when you press the post button instead of the preview button.  You publish a story before it’s time.

I’m working on compiling a complete list of MySQL storage engines. I didn’t intend to publish this so soon.  Maybe you can tell me what I’m missing.

Here is what I’ve found so far.  This is mostly an update of an older work I found.  Now that it’s posted I work hard to complete it.

I see that “Big Data” has become the new buzzword with a spike of hype around it. Everyone’s jumping on it. Companies are eager to promote their products as “Big Data,” just as they were eager to be associated with Web 2.0, Service-Oriented Architectures, and all the rest. Predictably, there’s basically zero agreement on what it means.

I’ve seen “Big Data” mentioned in the context of 1TB, which I think is rather moderate sized. But worse yet, I’ve seen 100GB labeled Big Data. I’ve even seen 5GB labeled Big Data. No links — I don’t want to draw attention to them.

I don’t know what Big Data is, but the stick-of-gum-sized flash drive in my pocket holds 16GB. It’s pretty Small. I mean, I forget it’s even there — it’s definitely not Big. I don’t know where I’d draw the line, but if it fits in a commodity server’s memory, which 100GB can do easily these days, it’s not Big Data. I don’t even …