As the need for information grows so does the size of data we need to keep in our databases. SST is unavoidable for spinning up new nodes in a PXC cluster and when datasets reach the “terra-byte” range this becomes ever more cumbersome requiring many hours for a new node to synchronize.

More often that not, it is necessary to implement custom “wsrep_sst” scripts or resort to manual synchronization processes. Luckily cloud providers provide convenient methods to leverage disk snapshots that can be used to quickly transfer data between nodes.

This article deals with the actions needed to perform a snapshot on Google’s Compute Engine (GCE) infrastructure. A similar method can be used on AWS EC2 instances using EBS snapshots or any other form of snapshots such as LVM, ZFS or SAN. The steps described can be …

In MySQL Character encoding – part 1 we stated that the myriad of ways in which character encoding can be controlled can lead to many situations where your data may not be available as expected.

UTF8 was designed on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992.

Setting MySQL Client and Server Character encoding.

Lets restart MySQL with the correct setting for our purpose, UTF8. Here we can see the setting in the MySQL configuration file, in this case /etc/mysql/my.cnf.

character-set-server = utf8

This change is then reflected in the session and global variables once the instance is restarted with the new configuration parameter.

mysql> SELECT …

Technical conferences are flooded with visual [mis]representations of a particular product's performance, compression, cost effectiveness, micro-transactions per flux-capacitor, or whatever two-axis comparison someone dreams up. Lets be honest, benchmarketers like to believe we all suffer from innumeracy.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines innumeracy as follows:
innumeracy (noun): marked by an ignorance of mathematics and the scientific approach Mark Callaghan has been a long time advocate of explaining benchmark results, but that's not the point of the bar chart. Oh no, the bar chart only exists to catch your eye and …

From time to time people wonder how to implement roles in MySQL. This can be useful for companies having to deal with many user accounts or for companies with tight security requirements (PCI or HIPAA for instance). Roles do not exist in regular MySQL but here is an example on how to emulate them using Percona Server, the PAM plugin and proxy users.

The goal

Say we have 2 databases: db1 and db2, and we want to be able to create 3 roles:

• db1_dev: can read and write on db1 only.
• db2_dev: can read and write on db2 only.
• stats: can read on db1 and db2

For each role, we will create one user: joe (db1_dev), mike (db2_dev) and tom (stats).

Setting up the Percona PAM plugin

The Percona PAM plugin is distributed with Percona Server 5.5 and 5.6. I will be using …

  Packt Publishing started a Free Learning Campaign by providing a free ebook everyday till 6th March 2015. How ? Follow this link: http://bit.ly/1DoRno5

DBAs often encounter situations where they need to kill queries to ensure there are no long-running queries on a MySQL server that would impact performance. Long-running queries can be the result of many factors. Fortunately, Percona Server contains some handy tools to remove problematic MySQL processes. I will highlight all of the tools via some examples in this post.

pt-kill:
There have been some good posts on this blog about the pt-kill tool, like this one by Arunjith Aravindan titled “How a set of queries can be killed in MySQL using Percona Toolkit’s pt-kill.” Let’s dive into pt-kill a bit further with a few more …

The General Availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4 has just been announced by Oracle.

The MySQL team at Oracle are excited to announce the General Availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4, ready for production workloads.

MySQL Cluster 7.4.4 can be downloaded from mysql.com and the release notes viewed in the MySQL docs.

Figure 1 provides a summary of the enhancements delivered in this release:

• Performance
  • 200M NoSQL Reads/Sec
  • 2.5M SQL Ops/Sec
  • 50% …

MySQL Connector/Python 2.1.1 took a while to release and that was because we had to add some more packages which contains the optional C Extension. Note that this is still Alpha and we want you guys to report any problems and requests.

The Connector/Python C Extension was added because in certain situations, for example reading a huge result set, can take a long time with pure Python. That’s why we choose to interface with Connector/C (libmysqlclient).

Note: Pure Python is still default and it will be kept that way!

Installing Connector/Python 2.1 didn’t change much:

shell> python setup.py install

If you’d like …

MySQL Connector/Python 2.1.1 took a while to release and that was because we had to add some more packages which contains the optional C Extension. Note that this is still Alpha and we want you guys to report any problems and requests.

The Connector/Python C Extension was added because in certain situations, for example reading a huge result set, can take a long time with pure Python. That’s why we choose to interface with Connector/C (libmysqlclient).

Note: Pure Python is still default and it will be kept that way!

Installing Connector/Python 2.1 didn’t change much:

$ sudo python setup.py install

If …

MySQL Connector/Python 2.1.1 took a while to release and that was because we had to add some more packages which contains the optional C Extension. Note that this is still Alpha and we want you guys to report any problems and requests.

The Connector/Python C Extension was added because in certain situations, for example reading a huge result set, can take a long time with pure Python. That’s why we choose to interface with Connector/C (libmysqlclient).

Note: Pure Python is still default and it will be kept that way!

Installing Connector/Python 2.1 didn’t change much:

sh $ sudo python setup.py install

…