Hopefully by now you have already seen that we are working on Hadoop replication. I’m happy to say that it is going really well. I’ve managed to push a few terabytes of data and different data sets through into Hadoop on Cloudera, HortonWorks, and Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce (EMR). For those who have been following my long association with the IBM InfoSphere BigInsights Hadoop product, and I’m pleased to say that it’s working there too. I’ve had to adapt Robert’s original script to work with the different versions of the underlying Hadoop tools and systems to make it compatible. The actual performance and process is unchanged; you just use a different JS-based batchloader script to work with different tools.

Robert has also been simplifying some of the core functionality, such as configuring some fixed pre-determined formats, so you no longer have to explicitly set the field and record separators.

I’ve also been …

On Thursday MySQL technology saw a huge boost. It’s hard for anyone now to argue that MySQL isn’t in the game of extreme scalability and performance, which some NoSQL vendors have been using as a tagline for the last years. To see four of the largest MySQL and MariaDB users come together to bootstrap a branch of MySQL for extreme scaling needs is simply fantastic. The improvements done inside these companies will now be available to the rest of the community. In all fairness Facebook and Twitter, in particular, have been making their improvements publicly available also before. Google has also made some improvements available publicly over the years and have lately been active in the MariaDB project with code reviews, bug fixes and other patches. But broadening the public contributions further and combining it all, is new.

Engineering of MySQL technology happens in many places. Aside from Oracle and the companies behind WebScaleSQL, …

Oracle has improved the AES encryption/decryption functions in MySQL 5.6.17. They improved it a lot and posted a blog which explains all the details.

If you would like to know more about encryption there are two resources I would recommend:

• The Code Book by Simon Singh. This is about the history of cryptography, but it also includes a lot of information about crypto which is currently in use. This is also a very entertaining read.
• Crypto 101, a free/opensource book which gives a intro to crypto. The webpage also has a video of the talk on which the book is based.

And if you're going to …

Dealing with churn, is one of the most important elements of building a subscription business.  While some churn is inevitable over time, too much churn indicates a more fundamental problem: customers aren't finding value in your product.  

I wrote an article over at GigaOm on this subject including some examples about how to reduce churn from my experience at MySQL and Zendesk.

Having churn is like rowing a leaky boat. After a while, you spend more time bailing water than moving forward. By contrast, organizations that focus on reducing churn will find that their revenue grows every quarter.

To accurately measure what’s going on, you should begin by breaking out churn (customer cancellation) from …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.2.1-alpha1 on March 28th 2014. Downloads are available from our download site here. This ALPHA release, will be available in our Debian experimental and CentOS testing repositories.

This is an ALPHA quality release and it is not intended for production. If you want a high quality, Generally …

March 28, 2014 By Severalnines

Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo - March 31st to April 4th

The Severalnines Team Will Be Onsite at Booth 418 - Come Say Hello!

If you’re still thinking about whether or not you should be attending the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo that starts on Monday 31st of March, here are 9 reasons (we are Severalnines after all) on why we’ll be there. May these help you positively in your decision making ;-)

1. The 2014 edition showcases the most promising program yet

Sounds like a cliché-reason to be listed here, but this year’s program is in fact quite diversified in its …

Percona Server 5.6.11-60.3 introduces a new “log archiving” feature. Percona XtraBackup 2.1.5 supports “apply archived logs.” What does it mean and how it can be used?

Percona products propose three kinds of incremental backups. The first is full scan of data files and comparison the data with backup data to find some delta. This approach provides a history of changes and saves disk space by storing only data deltas. But the disadvantage is a full-data file scan that adds load to the disk subsystem. The second kind of incremental backup avoids extra disk load during data file scans.

The idea is in reading only changed data pages. The information about what specific pages were changed is provided by the server itself which …

Sharecat provides supply chain management solutions to oil and gas operators, delivering an innovative collaborative environment which includes the manufacturers' equipment catalogues and technical information. The products provide visibility and fully validated content to all parties in the plant lifecycle. Based in Norway, the company has offices in the UK, Australia and the United States.

Challenges

• Deliver Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based solutions with a Web interface to oil and gas operators. The database powering the applications needed to store and deliver fast access to a large amount of information, including all components necessary for the construction and the maintenance of oil rigs. Product catalogs are updated on a continuous basis with manufacturers, product numbering, data templates and documentation. They …

A colleague and I have been looking at GTID on MySQL recently and you may be interested in the blog post that results from that. You can see it here. http://blog.booking.com/mysql-5.6-gtids-evaluation-and-online-migration.html.

Hadoop is an increasingly popular means of analyzing transaction data from single MySQL or multiple MySQL servers. Up until now mechanisms for moving data between MySQL and Hadoop have been rather limited. The new Continuent Tungsten Replicator 3.0 provides enterprise-quality replication from MySQL to Hadoop. Tungsten Replicator 3.0 is 100% open source, released under a GPL V2 license, and