The latest from the MySQL community

MySQL databases are great work horses of the internet.  They back tons of modern websites, from blogs and checkout carts, to huge sites like Facebook.  But these technologies don't run themselves.  When you're faced with a system that is slowing down, you'll need the right tools to diagnose and troubleshoot the problem.  MySQL has a huge community following and that means scores of great tools for your toolbox. Here are 7 ways to troubleshoot MySQL.

1. Use innotop

Innotop is a great tool for MySQL which despite the name monitors MySQL generally as well as InnoDB usage.  It's fairly easy to install, just download the perl script. Be sure to include a [client] section to your local users .my.cnf file (you have one don't you?).  Inside that section, place one line with "user=xyz" and one line with "password=abc".

If you're concerned that installing something new is too …

1. Backup outside of the Cloud

Some of the high profile companies affected by Amazon's April 2011 outage could have recovered had they kept a backup of their entire site outside of the cloud.  With any hosting provider, managed traditional data center or cloud provider, alternate backups are always a good idea.  A MySQL logical backup and/or incremental backup can be copied regularly offsite or to an alternate cloud provider.  That's real insurance!

2. Use alternate regions and availability zones

Amazon's outage in April …

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MySQL in the Cloud

• Deploying MySQL in the Cloud
• Cloud Security considerations for databases
• Deploying in multiple Availability Zones
• Deploying in multiple regions
• Deploying MySQL with multi-az
• Horizontal scalability in the cloud
• MySQL spinup scripts
• Deploying Amazon RDS
• Evaluating RDS
• Evaluating MySQL in the cloud
• EBS Performance considerations
• Tuning MySQL parameters in the cloud
• Backup types & options
• Mitigating against cloud server failure
• Vertical scalability & MySQL on EC2

MySQL Consulting and Services

• Backup & recovery
• MySQL master master replication
• MySQL replication & horizontal scaling
• MySQL …

Deploying in the Amazon cloud is touted as a great way to achieve high scalability while paying only for the computing power you use. How do you get the best scalability from the technology?

1. Use Auto-scaling

Auto-scaling is a unique feature of cloud computing and Amazon's EC2 offering. Setup a load balancer and a couple of webservers for your application as you normally would. Design your webserver based on a template AMI that you'll reuse over and over. Then setup auto-scaling and set thresholds based on the traffic you forecast. When a threshold is passed, AWS will spinup a new instance of your webserver, and roll it into the load balancer pool automatically. Once traffic falls below the scale back threshold, Amazon will take a server out of the pool for you.

Be sure to monitor this …

I hope everyone is enjoying summertime, at least in the northern hemisphere. I’m about to head out to the pool, but before I go, here is a summary of this week’s blog posts.

1. Introduction to Perl interface for Monitis API
Monitis announces a simple way to access its API through Perl, a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. This post demonstrates some examples for using the API with Perl and describes some of the benefits of the programming language. The source can be found on our Github page.

2. 101 Tips to MySQL Tuning and Optimization …

I was at a conference recently talking with a Major Cloud Hosting Provider and mentioned that for database servers, I really want large instances, quite a bit larger than the largest I can get now. The lack of cloud servers with lots of memory, many fast cores, and fast I/O and network performance leads to premature sharding, which is costly. A large number of applications can currently run on a single real server, but would require sharding to run in any of the popular cloud providers’ environments. And many of those applications aren’t growing rapidly, so by the time they outgrow today’s hardware we can pretty much count on simply upgrading and staying on a single machine.

The person I was talking to actually seemed to become angry at me, and basically called me an idiot. This person’s opinion is that no one should be running on anything larger than 4GB of memory, and anyone who doesn’t build their system to be sharded …

In March I posted a series of blog posts on my paternity leave MepSQL project, which I called MepSQL. There was still one piece created in the MepSQL buildsystem that I didn't publish or blog about. Since it is generally useful, I wanted to generalize and polish it and publish it separately. I finally had that done last week, when I also found that somebody else, namely alestic.com already published a similar solution 2 years ago. So yesterday I ported my BuildBot setup to use that system instead and am happy to publish it at the Open DB Camp 2011 in Sardinia.

Ok, so let's go back a little... What is the problem we are solving?

Let's …

Two themes emerged at this week's MySQL conference: Mix your relational database with less formal solutions and move to the cloud. Naturally, the event included many other talks of a more immediate practical nature: data warehousing and business intelligence, performance (both in MySQL configuration and in the environment, which includes the changes caused by replacing disks with Flash), how to scale up, and new features in both MySQL and its children. But everyone seemed to agree that MySQL does not stand alone.

The world of databases have changed both in scale and in use. As Baron Schwartz said in his broad-vision keynote, databases are starting to need to handle petabytes. And he criticized open source database options as having poorer performance than proprietary ones. As for use, the databases struggle to meet two types of requirements: requests from business users for …

I chatted today about VMware's Cloud Foundry with Roger Bodamer, the EVP of products and technology at 10Gen. 10Gen's MongoDB is one of three back-ends (along with MySQL and Redis) supported from the start by Cloud Foundry.

If I understand Cloud Foundry and VMware's declared "Open PaaS" strategy, it should fill a gap in services. Suppose you are a developer who wants to loosen the bonds between your programs and the hardware they run on, for the sake of flexibility, fast ramp-up, or cost savings. Your choices are:

An IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) product, which hands you an emulation of bare metal where you run an appliance (which you may need to build up yourself) combining an operating system, application, and related services such as DNS, firewall, and a …

This is the third post in a series about developing the MepSQL build system. In the previous posts we chose BuildBot running in the Amazon EC2 cloud. In this post we actually get a closer look at how the packages are being built (to be followed by even closer looks in later posts :-)

One of the things missing when you fork MySQL is the build system. (The other main missing component being the manual.) It is possible for anyone to compile MySQL from source, but the actual build system (scripts, testing, etc) used by MySQL itself is not public. The same is true for the automated testing. MariaDB uses the open source tool called …