I am in Las Vegas this week at the Live 360 Conference for Microsoft Developers. There is a lot of interest in using MySQL with the Entity Framework object-relational mapper and I have been pointing to Using an Entity Framework Entity as a Windows Forms Data Source. So for all you who asked, here is the blog post I promised with relevant link.

Monitoring MySQL and effectively managing it can be challenging. Identifying issues before they grow into performance problems that impact end users can be crucial. Knowing which tools to use, which key metrics to monitor, and how to resolve issues can be enormously important. When considering these facts, we at Percona decided to take steps to provide our Support customers with the tools, alerts, and advice they need to have higher performing, more secure, and easier to manage MySQL deployments.

Percona Support Now Includes MONyog and Percona Advisors

I am pleased to announce that Percona now provides our Gold and Platinum Percona Support for MySQL customers with the enterprise grade tools and advice they need for better performance, fewer database issues, and effective monitoring of MySQL. We have partnered with Webyog to provide our customers with MONyog …

MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database. Sphinx allows MySQL users to search text (and more) at scale, without choking-out their favorite database. It’s a match made in the big data heavens. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this year, like many years before, we’ll be heading to the Percona Live MySQL [...]

Yesterday we released TokuDB v7.1.5, which includes the following important features and fixes:

• Upgraded MySQL and MariaDB to version 5.5.36.
• Six months of performance improvements to our underlying Fractal Tree indexing.
• Fixes for bugs, stalls, and behavioral issues reported by users.
• Fixes for issues identified by the addition of Random Query Generator (RQG) testing.
• Fixes for issues identified by the addition of Valgrind testing.
• Full details on the changes in TokuDB v7.1.5 can be found in the release notes section of the TokuDB User’s Guide, available from our documentation page.

As always, you can download the Community and Enterprise Editions from the …

With many apologies to David Bowie, come 2009 it was my 5 year anniversary with Sun (well, MySQL AB and then Sun). Companies tend to like to talk about how they like to retain employees and that many employees stay with the company for a long time. It is very, very expensive to hire the right people, so this is largely a good plan.

In 2009, it was five years since I joined MySQL AB – something I didn’t quite originally expect (let’s face it, in the modern tech industry you’re always surprised when you’re somewhere for more than a few years).

The whole process of having been with sun for 5 years seemed rather impersonal… it largely felt like a form letter automatically sent out with a certificate and small badge (below). You also got to go onto a web site and choose from a variety of gifts. So, what did I choose? The one thing that would be useful at Burning Man: a camelbak.

…

March 11, 2014 By Severalnines

For ops folks with multiple environments and instances to manage, a fully programmable infrastructure is the basis for automation. ClusterControl exposes all functionality through a REST API. The web UI also interacts with the REST API to retrieve monitoring data (cluster load, alarms, backup status, etc.) or to send management commands (add/remove nodes, run backups, upgrade a cluster, add/remove load balancer, etc.). The API is written in PHP and runs under Apache. The diagram below illustrates the architecture of ClusterControl.

Figure: ClusterControl - Agentless Architecture

In this blog post, we will show you how to interact directly with the ClusterControl API to retrieve monitoring data or to perform management tasks.

All requests against …

TL;DR version: The backup locks feature introduced in Percona Server 5.6.16-64.0 is a lightweight alternative to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK and can be used to take both physical and logical backups with less downtime on busy servers. To employ the feature with mysqldump, use mysqldump --lock-for-backup --single-transaction. The next release of Percona XtraBackup will also be using backup locks automatically if the target server supports the feature.

Now on to the gory details, but let’s start with some history.

In the beginning…

In the beginning there was FLUSH TABLES, and users messed with their MyISAM tables under a live server and were not ashamed. Users could do nice things like:

mysql> FLUSH TABLES;
# execute myisamchk, myisampack, backup / restore some tables, etc.

And users were happy until someone realized that tables must be …

Problem

Using MySQL Connector/Python, you are calling a stored procedure which is also selecting data and you would like to fetch the rows of the result.

Solution

For this example we create a stored procedure which is executing SHOW SLAVE STATUS.

cnx = mysql.connector.connect(user='scott', password='tiger',
                              database='mining')
cur = cnx.cursor()
cur.execute("DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS slave_status")
proc = "CREATE PROCEDURE slave_status () BEGIN SHOW SLAVE STATUS; END"
cur.execute()
cur.call("slave_status")

for result_cursor in cur.stored_results():
 for row in result_cursor:
   print(row[0])

The result from the above would be:

shell> python foo.py
Waiting for master to send event

Discussion

The stored_results() method of …

This is the 8th installment in the rather long series that started with Part 1 about a month ago.

Back in 2006, we were in the situation where MySQL 5.0 had taken forever, and the first “GA” release was not suitable for production. Looking towards MySQL 5.1, it was also unlikely to be out any time soon. The MySQL Cluster team had customers that needed new features in a stable release. The majority of users didn’t use the MySQL server at all, they directly used the C++ NDB API for the vast majority of queries – so the vast majority of release blocker bugs in the MySQL server would not affect the production readiness of MySQL Cluster for these customers.

So, the decision was wisely made to do separate releases from a separate tree for MySQL Cluster. This was named MySQL Cluster: …

 Many people think buffered write (write()/pwrite()) is fast because it does not do disk access. But this is not always true. Buffered write sometimes does disk access by itself, or waits for some disk accesses by other threads. Here are three common cases where write() takes longer time (== causing stalls).
1. Read Modify Write Suppose the following logic. Opening aaa.dat without O_DIRECT/O_SYNC, writing 1000 bytes sequentially for 100,000 times, then flushing by fsync().

  fd=open("aaa.dat", O_WRONLY);
  for(i=0; i< 100000; i++) {
    write(fd, buf, 1000);
  }
  fsync(fd);

 You might think each write() will finish fast enough (at least less than 0.1ms) because it shouldn't do any disk access. But it is not always true.
 Operating System manages I/O by page. It's 4KB for most Linux environments. If you'd modify 1000 bytes of the 4KB page from offset 0, Linux first needs to read the 4KB …