I've previously written about AppArmor and MySQL, and how to change MySQL's default file locations on systems with AppArmor enabled. Ubuntu and SUSE ship with AppArmor enabled, but some other distributions such as Oracle Linux don't, along with related distrubutions such as Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora. Rather, these other distributions use another mandatory access control system called SELinux. 

Here's some technical detail that might come in handy later.

SELinux uses concepts such as types and domains. Types belong to resources such as files and ports; these are the "objects" in SELinux. Domains contain the "subjects" (processes) and object types that are associated with each other in some way, for example because they are all related to …

MySQL is deployed in 9 of the top 10 most trafficked sites on the web including Facebook, Twitter, eBay and YouTube, as well as in some of the fastest growing services such as Tumblr, Pinterest and box.com

Working with these companies has given MySQL developers, consultants and support engineers unique insight into how to design database-driven web architectures – whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud.

The MySQL Web Reference Architectures are a set of documented and repeatable best practices for building infrastructure that deliver the highest levels of scalability, agility and availability with the lowest levels of cost, risk and complexity. 

Four components common to most web and mobile properties are sized, with optimum deployment architectures for each:

• …

MySQL accesses files in various places on the file system, and usually this isn't something to worry about. For example, in a standard MySQL 5.5 installation on Ubuntu, the data goes in /var/lib/mysql, and the socket is a file in /var/run/mysqld. It puts configuration files in /etc, logs and binaries in various locations, and it even needs to access some operating system files such as /etc/hosts.allow.

This is all very well until you start trying to be clever and get MySQL to access other parts of the file system. After all, you can configure the location of data, log files, socket, and so on, so why shouldn't you use those settings to optimize your system? Unfortunately, on many modern Linux distributions, it's not that always easy.

Take Ubuntu, for example. Ubuntu comes with something called AppArmor, a kernel-integrated application security system that controls how applications can access the file system. This goes above …

Oracle's MySQL team is running/participating to a number of events during the upcoming weeks and months. Don't miss this chance to learn about the latest developments straight from the source and to get all your questions answered!

Additional events will likely be scheduled down the road and posted on our events page, but you can already register for the following ones:

MySQL Tech Tour: Big Data and High Availability with MySQL– Pleasanton, California

January 22

MySQL Tech Tour: Big Data and High Availability with MySQL– Belmont, California

January …

“Big Data” offers the potential for organizations to revolutionize their operations. With the volume of business data doubling every 1.2 years, analysts and business users are discovering very real benefits when integrating and analyzing data from multiple sources, enabling deeper insight into their customers, partners, and business processes.

As the world’s most popular open source database, and the most deployed database in the web and cloud, MySQL is a key component of many big data platforms, with Hadoop vendors estimating 80% of deployments are integrated with MySQL.

The new Guide to MySQL and Hadoop presents the tools enabling integration between the two data platforms, supporting the data lifecycle from acquisition and organisation to …

Solid State Drive (SSD) have made it big and have made their way not only in desktop computing but also in mission-critical servers. SSDs have proved to be a break-through in IO performance and leave HDD far far behind in terms of Random IO performance. Random IO is what most of the database administrators would be concerned about as that is 90% of the IO pattern visible on database servers like MySQL. I have found Intel 520-series and Intel 910-series to be quite popular and they do give very good numbers in terms of Random IOPS. However, its not just performance that you should be concerned about, failure predictions and health gauges are also very important, as loss of data is a big NO-NO. There is a great deal of misconception about the endurance level of SSD, as its mostly compared to rotating disks even when measuring endurance levels, however, there is a big difference in how both SSD and HDD work, and that has a direct impact on the endurance …

In my previous blog post, I discussed the enhanced performance and scalability delivered by extensions to the multi-threaded data nodes in MySQL Cluster 7.2. In this post, I’ll share best practices on the configuration of data nodes to achieve optimum performance on the latest generations of multi-core, multi-thread CPU designs.

Configuring the Data Nodes

The configuration of data node threads can be managed in two ways via the config.ini file:

- Simply set MaxNoOfExecutionThreads to the appropriate number of threads to be run in the data node, based on the number of threads presented by the processors used in the host or VM.

- Use the new ThreadConfig variable that enables users to configure both the number of each thread type to use and …

Summary

The scalability enhancements delivered by extensions to multi-threaded data nodes enables MySQL Cluster 7.2 to deliver over 8x higher performance than the previous MySQL Cluster 7.1 release on a recent benchmark

What’s New in MySQL Cluster 7.2

MySQL Cluster 7.2 was released as GA (Generally Available) in February 2012, delivering many enhancements to performance on complex queries, new NoSQL Key / Value API, cross-data center replication and ease-of-use. These enhancements are summarized in the Figure below, and detailed in the MySQL Cluster New Features whitepaper

Figure 1: Next Generation Web Services, Cross Data Center Replication and Ease-of-Use

Once of the key enhancements delivered in MySQL …

InSourceCode developers work on "Madison" with volunteers.

There wasn't a great deal of hacking, at least in the traditional sense, at the "first congressional hackathon." Given the general shiver that the word still evokes in many a Washingtonian in 2011, that might be for the best. The attendees gathered together in the halls of the United States House of Representatives didn't create a more interactive visualization of how laws are made or a mobile health app. As open government advocate Carl Malamud observed, the "hack" felt like something even rarer in the "Age of the App for That:"

Impressed @MattLira pulled off a truly bipartisan tech event on the hill. …

Jon Bruner's "American Migration" visualization, based on IRS data, demonstrates how "Americans are enormously mobile: 37.5 million people moved from one house to another last year, with 4.3 million of them moving between states." Bruner's interactive map lets you click on a specific county and see both the immigration and emigration data for that location — where folks move from and where they move to.

Screenshot from the "American Migration" visualization (click for full interactive version).

As …