The latest from the MySQL community

Sometimes it is desired to use particular software versions in production, and not necessary the latest ones. There may be several reasons for that, where I think the most common is when a new version should spend some time in testing or a staging environment before getting to production. In theory each new version is supposed to be better as usually it contains a handful of bug fixes and even new or improved functionality. However there is also a risk of some regression or a new bug introduction as a side effect of code changes.

Quite often DBAs want the same MySQL version to be installed on all database instances, regardless of what actually is the latest version available in the software provider’s repository. There are several ways to achieve this:
* download specific version packages manually and then install them,
* have custom local repository mirror where you decide when and which version gets there, and just update …

January 5, 2015 By Severalnines

Cloud storage is hot. Dropbox, Apple iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive and Amazon Cloud Drive all offer cloud sharing platforms where you can store documents in the cloud and access them from all your devices. For enterprises who require full control, ownCloud is an open source solution that allows files to be stored on-premises and/or a backend cloud. 

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to deploy a high availability setup using ownCloud Community Edition. We will need to set up redundancy in each of the following layers:

• file storage
• web server
• database server
• load balancer

We will use five servers. ownCloud will run on three separate servers with MySQL Galera Cluster 5.6 and GlusterFS running on RHEL 6.5 64bit. ownCloud supports GlusterFS as primary storage. ClusterControl will be co-located …

Check Out Our Latest Technical Resources for MySQL, MariaDB & MongoDB Clusters

Like every month this year, we have created new content and tools for you; here is a summary of what we’ve published this December. Please do check it out and let us know if you have any comments or feedback.

And thank you for following us in the past 12 months and for your fidelity; we look forward to “seeing” you next year as well and wish you a great start to 2015!

New Live Technical Webinars

Infrastructure automation isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either, says Riaan Nolan. Riaan has been in operations for the past decade, and has built over a dozen eCommerce …

If you are automating your infrastructure deployments with Chef, then read on. We are glad to announce the availability of a Chef cookbook for ClusterControl. This cookbook replaces previous cookbooks we released for ClusterControl and Galera Cluster. For those using Puppet, please have a look at our Puppet module for ClusterControl.

ClusterControl Cookbook on Chef Supermarket

The ClusterControl cookbook is available on Chef Supermarket, and getting the cookbook is as easy as:

$ knife cookbook site download clustercontrol

This cookbook supports the installation of ClusterControl on top of existing database clusters:

• Galera Cluster
  • MySQL Galera Cluster by Codership
  …

For an online shop, the website is the cash register. It has to be open for business 24 hours a day.

As the ops person on duty, when you get a call at 3am after your website went down, your priority number one is to restore the service asap. But why can we not have our application stack automatically recover, and not have the pager wake us at all? Why do we still stick to tedious manual processes, which take up time and resources, and hinder future growth?

Infrastructure automation isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either, says Riaan Nolan. Riaan has been in operations for the past decade, and has built over a dozen eCommerce properties. Automation is a worthwhile investment for retailers serious about eCommerce, but deciding on which tools to invest in can be a confusing and overwhelming process.

Join us for this webinar to understand the key pain points that online retailers experience which indicate it’s time …

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in last week’s webinar on 'Galera Cluster for MySQL vs MySQL (NDB) Cluster: A High Level Comparison'. If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

In this webinar, Severalnines VP of Products, Alex Yu, who was part of the team at Ericsson who originally developed the NDB storage engine in 2001, gave an overview of the two clustering architectures and discussed their respective strengths and weaknesses: 

1. MySQL Cluster architecture: strengths and limitations
2. Galera Architecture: strengths and limitations
3. Deployment scenarios
4. Data migration
5. Read and write workloads (Optimistic/pessimistic locking)
6. WAN/Geographical replication
7. Schema changes
8. Management and monitoring …

I had an enjoyable time last night at Twitter with local MySQL DBAs and developers. We had an attendee who has no experience with SQL or programming at all. She is interested in organizing her collection of recipes and had heard a rumor that MySQL was a good tool to use for this task. She indicated that her desktop runs Windows 7. I think I’m going to encourage her to turn her concept in to a community project, as she is not the first person I’ve met who wants to organize recipes!

We were hosted by Rob at Twitter, who used to work with Lisa back before she retired. He’s a member of the site reliability team and keeps the fail whale from rearing its blubbery head.

Pizza was provided by my dear friend and long-time open source buddy Gerry Narvaja with the assistance of the folks in the kitchen at Zeek’s.

We discussed new techniques in the areas of load …

Madrid MySQL Users Group will have its next meeting on Tuesday, the 18th of December. Details can be found on the group’s Meetup page here: http://www.meetup.com/Madrid-MySQL-users-group/events/219081693/.  This will be meeting number 10 of MMUG and the last meeting of the year. We plan to talk about MySQL, MariaDB and related things. An excuse to talk about our … Continue reading MMUG10: Madrid MySQL Users Group meeting to take place on 18th December 2014

MariaDB tries to encourage use of many storage engines, which Oracle doesn't bother with. The ones that could be considered -- occasionally! -- as InnoDB replacements are: Mroonga, TokuDB, and Aria.

Mroonga

I predicted that Mroonga would be in MariaDB 10.0.8, and behold, here it is in MariaDB 10.0.15. Truly I am the Nostradamus of the database world.

It's a general-purpose storage engine, in that it doesn't have serious limitations regarding what can be stored or indexed. I think its "column-store" feature has limited appeal, but as I saw in January, it's dandy for full-text searching. This time I look at the list of "Full-Text Restrictions" in the MySQL manual, and quote from it:

"Full-text searches are supported for …

December 8, 2014 By Severalnines

Percona XtraBackup is a great backup tool with lots of nice features to make online and consistent backups, although the variety of options can be a bit overwhelming. s9s_backup tries to make it simpler for users, it creates an easy to use interface for XtraBackup features such as full backups, incremental backups, streaming/non-streaming, and parallel compression.

Backups are organized into backup sets, consisting of a full backup and zero or more incremental backups. s9s_backup manages the LSNs (Log Sequence Number) of the XtraBackups. The backup set can then be restored as one single unit using just one command.

In earlier posts, we covered various ways on restoring your backup files …