Good news for those wanting to run MariaDB on POWER systems, the latest 10.0 bzr tree (as of a couple of weeks ago) builds and runs well!

I recently pulled the latest MariaDB 10.0 from BZR and built it on a POWER8 system in the lab to run some quick tests. The MariaDB team has done some work on getting MariaDB to run on POWER recently, a bunch of which is based off my work on MySQL on POWER.

There’s obviously still some work in progress going on, but my initial results show performance within around 10% of MySQL, so with a bit of work we will hopefully see MariaDB reach performance parity.

One interesting find was the code to account for thread memory usage uses a single atomic variable: this does not scale and does end up showing up on profiles.

I’ll comment more on the code in a future post, but it looks like we will have MariaDB being functional on POWER in an upcoming release.

MySQL replication is a core process for maintaining multiple copies of data – and replication is a very important aspect in database administration. In order to synchronize data between master and slaves you need to make sure that data transfers smoothly, and to do so you need to act promptly regarding replication errors to continue data synchronization. Here on the Percona Support team, we often help customers with replication broken-related issues. In this post I’ll highlight the top most critical replication error code 1236 along with the causes and cure. MySQL replication error “Got fatal error 1236” can be triggered by multiple reasons and I will try to cover all of them.

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MariaDB 10.0.14 was recently released, and is available for download here:

https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/10.0.14/

This is the fifth GA release of MariaDB 10.0, and 15th overall release of MariaDB 10.0.

This is primarily a bug-fix release. (MariaDB 10.0 is the current stable series of MariaDB. It is an evolution of the MariaDB 5.5 with several entirely new features not found anywhere else and with backported and reimplemented features from MySQL 5.6.)

Here are the main items of note:

1. TokuDB upgraded to 7.5.0
2. XtraDB upgraded to 5.6.20-68.0
3. InnoDB upgraded to 5.6.20
4. …

MySQL 5.7.5 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.7, and is the “m15″ or “Milestone 15″ release), and is available for download here and here.

As for the fixes/changes, there are quite a few (the official release was split into 3 separate emails), which is expected in such an early milestone release.

The main highlights for me were (though the enhancements, and potentially impactful changes, are definitely not limited to this list):

• InnoDB: The innodb_buffer_pool_size parameter is now dynamic, allowing you to resize the buffer pool without restarting the server. The resizing operation, which involves moving pages to a new location in memory, is performed chunks. Chunk size is configurable using the new …

It was great to see the recent announcement of MySQL 5.7.5 over at the MySQL Server Team blog. I’m looking forward to throwing this release at some of the POWER8 systems we have for a couple of really good reasons: 1) Does it work better than previous MySQL 5.7 releases “out of the box” on POWER? 2) What do the scalability improvements in 5.7.5 mean for peak QPS on POWER (and can I set a new record?).

Looking through the list of changes, I’m (casually not) surprised as to the number of features and the amount of work that echoes what we were working on in Drizzle a few years ago.

A closer look at the source for 5.7.5 may also prove enlightening, I wonder how the MySQL team is coping with a lot of the code rot legacy and the absolutely atrocious internal APIs they …

I’ve recently worked with customers using replication rings with 4+ servers; several servers accepting writes. The idea behind this design is always the same: by having multiple servers, you get high availability and by having multiple writer nodes, you get write scalability. Alas, this is simply not true. Here is why.

High Availability

Having several servers is a necessary condition to have high availability, but it’s far from sufficient. What happens if for instance C suddenly disappears?

• The replication ring is broken, so updates from A and B will never go to D. D will then quickly become so out-of-date that it’s not going to be usable. But wait! A will no longer receive the updates from B so A …

In my last post, I learned in disappointing fashion that sometimes you need to start small and work your way up, rather than trying to put together a finished product. This go-round, I’ll talk about my investigation into disk IO.

In an effort to better understand the hardware I have and it’s capacities, I started off by just trying to get some basic info about the RAID controller and the disks. This hardware in particular is a Supermicro, with a yet unknown RAID controller and 16 4TB disks arranged in RAID 6. Finding out more disk and controller information was the first step. “hdparm -i” wasn’t able to give me much, nor was “cat /sys/class/block/sdb/device/{model,vendor}”. “dmesg” …

As many learning experiences do, this one also starts out “So I was working on a project at work and…”.  In this case, the end result is to try to run as many concurrent copies of MySQL on a single server as possible, maintaining real time replication each running differing data sets. To help with this, I sent out to do this on a server with 36 7200rpm 4GB SATA disks, giving me roughly 120TB of available space to work with.

This isn’t an abnormal type of machine for us. Sometimes you simply need a ton of disk space. There is a quirk with this particular machine that I’ve been told: the RAID controller has some issues with addressing very large virtual disks and I should create 2 60TB volumes and stitch them together with LVM. Easy enough: pvcreate both volumes, create a volume group and a logical volume out of it and viola: …

Computer science is like an enormous tool box you can rummage through whenever you have a problem to solve. Most of the tools are sturdy and practical, like algorithms for B-trees. Some are also elegant, like consistent hashing in Dynamo. Finally there are some tools that you never quite figure out even after years of reflection. That piece of steel you are looking at could be Excalibur. Or it could be a rusty knife.

The CAP theorem falls into the last category, at least for me.  It was a major topic in the blogosphere a few years ago and Google Trends shows steadily increasing interest in the term since 2010.  It's not my goal to explain CAP fully--a good informal description is …

MySQL 5.6.21 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.6, is GA), and is available for download here.

For this release, there was 1 “InnoDB Notes” and 1 “Functionality Added or Changed” bug fix (and 0 “Security Fix”), so not much there, but of course they should be noted:

1. InnoDB Note: The –skip-innodb option is now deprecated and its use results in a warning. It will be removed in a future MySQL release. This also applies to its synonyms (–innodb=OFF, –disable-innodb, and so forth).
2. Functionality Added: Internally, spatial data types such as Geometry are represented as BLOB values, so when invoked with the –hex-blob option, mysqldump now displays spatial values in hex. (Bug #43544, Bug …