About 6 years ago (feels like an eternity in Rails world) working at Scribd I’ve started working on porting our codebase from some old version or Rails to a slightly newer one. That’s when I realized, that there wasn’t a ruby gem to help us manage MySQL connections for our vertically sharded databases (different models on different servers). I’ve started hacking on some code to replace whatever we were using back then, finished the first version of the migration branch and then decided to open the code for other people to use. That’s how the DbCharmer ruby gem was born.

For the next few years a lot of new functionality we needed has been added to the gem, making it more complex and immensely more powerful. I’ve enjoyed working on it, developing those features, contributing to the community. But then I left Scribd, stopped being a user of DbCharmer and the situation drastically changed. For quite some time (years) I would keep …

Sometimes users ask for something that doesn’t really make sense. On the first glance. But then you start asking and realize that the user was right, you were wrong, and it is, actually, a perfectly logical and valid use case.

I’ve had one of these moments when I’ve heard about a request of making triggers to work on the slave in the row-based replication. Like, really? In RBR all changes made by triggers are replicated from the master to slaves as row events. If triggers would be fired on the slave they would do their changes twice. And anyway, assuming that one only has triggers one the slave (why?) in statement-based replication triggers would run on the slave normally, wouldn’t they?

Well, yes, they would, but one cannot always use statement-based replication. If one could, RBR would’ve never been implemented. There are many cases that statement-based replication cannot handle correctly. Galera requires RBR too. And as …

Let me start with a little story. You sit in your house near the fireplace in the living room and need a book from the library… Eh, no, sorry, wrong century. You’re building a robotic arm that will open your beer or brew your coffee or supply you with whatever other drinks of your choice… while you’ll be building the next robotic arm. So, you — soldering iron in one hand and Arduino in another — ask your little brother to bring a box with specific resistors (that you unexpectedly run out of) from the cellar. The problem — your brother is small and cannot tell a resistor from a respirator. You explain that it’s small thing with two wires sticking out of it. And he starts going back and forth brining you boxes after boxes of different small things with two wires.

This is approximately where we were in MySQL when NDB Cluster was just added. The use wants to find a row, say WHERE number_of_wires=2 AND size='small' AND …

I don’t think it’ll surprise anybody if I say that MariaDB or MySQL server knows a lot more about server system variables, then just their values. Indeed, every variable can be session or global only, read-only or writable, it has an associated help text (that is printed on mysqld --help --verbose), certain variables only accept values from a given set of strings (this set of allowed values is also printed in mysqld --help --verbose since MariaDB 10.1.0), numeric variables have lower and upper range boundaries of valid values (that are never printed anywhere), and so on. I always thought it’s kind of a waste that there is no way to query this information. That could’ve been very convenient, in particular for various GUI clients — they could show the help in tooltips, validate values and so on.

But recently we’ve got our users asking for it — precisely, for system variable metadata, whether a variable …

One of the most popular plugin types both in MariaDB and MySQL is INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugin type. INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugins add new tables to the INFORMATION_SCHEMA. There are lots of INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugins, because they can be used to show just anything to the user and are very easy to write.

MariaDB 10.1.1 comes with nine INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugin:

• Feedback — shows the anonymised server usage information and can optionally send it to the configured url.
• Locales — lists compiled-in server locales, implemented by Roberto Spadim
• METADATA_LOCK_INFO — Lists metadata locks in the server. Implemented by Kentoku Shiba
• …

Every now and then there is a need to execute certain SQL statements conditionally. Easy, if you do it from your PHP (or Java or whatever) application. But if all you have is pure SQL? There are two techniques that MariaDB and MySQL use in the mysql_fix_privilege_tables.sql script (applied by mysql_upgrade tool).

1. Create a stored procedure with IF statements inside, call it once and drop it. This requires the user to have the CREATE ROUTINE privilege and mysql.proc table must exist and be usable (which is not necessarily true — we’re doing it from mysql_upgrade, right?).
2. Use dynamic SQL, like
   

   SET @str = IF (@have_csv = 'YES',
                  'CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS general_log (
                     event_time TIMESTAMP(6) NOT NULL,
                     user_host MEDIUMTEXT NOT NULL,
                     thread_id BIGINT(21) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, …

Yes! In MariaDB 10.1.1 tables in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA do not use .frm files. These files are not created, not read — in fact, PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA tables never touch the disk at all.

This became possible due to a lesser-known feature of MariaDB — new table discovery (“old table discovery” was implemented in MySQL for NDB Cluster in 2004), implemented in MariaDB 10.0.2. Instead of reading and parsing .frm files, MariaDB simply asks PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA table, what structure it has, and because these tables always have a fixed structure, the table directly returns it to MariaDB with no need for any external data dictionary.

It also means, you never need to upgrade PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA tables, they always have the correct structure corresponding to the MariaDB version …

It’s been a little while since I blogged on MySQL on POWER (last time was thinking that new releases would be much better for running on POWER). Well, I recently grabbed the MySQL 5.6.20 source tarball and had a go with it on a POWER8 system in the lab. There is good news: I now only need one patch to have it function pretty flawlessly (no crashes). Unfortunately, there’s still a bit of an odd thing with some of the InnoDB mutex code (bug filed at some point soon).

But, with this one patch applied, I was getting okay sysbench results and things are looking good.

Now just to hope the MySQL team applies my other patches that improve things on POWER. To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed many of them have sat there for this long… it doesn’t help build a development community when patches can sit for months without either …

What do the acronyms I18N or L10N stand for? What do they mean for developers of mobile applications in particular?

I hosted a session about localizing mobile applications at Developer Week 2014 in Nuremberg. It covers — among other things — text, numbers, date and time, images, and other localizable resources.

See the codecentric blog for slides and some more details.

The post and the slides are also available in German.

Introduction

Evaluating the performance of database systems is a very demanding task. There are a lot of hard choices to be made, e.g.:

• What operating system and operating system version is to be used
• What configuration setup is to be used
• What benchmarks are to be used and how long are the warm-up and measure times
• What test setups are to be used
• What version of the database management system is used
• What storage engine is used

While performance evaluation is mostly machine time, there is still a lot of hard work for the human monitoring the tests. In this blog post we have made following choices:

• We’re using an Intel Xeon E5-2690 @ 2.9GHz CPU containing 32-cores and Linux 3.4.12 with 132G main memory. The database is stored on a Fusion-IO ioDrive2 Duo 2.41TB Firmware v7.2.5, rev 110646, using Driver 3.3.4 build 5833069. The …