A very good meeting in Istanbul is drawing to an end. People from Monty Program, Facebook, Galera, Percona, SkySQL, and other parts of the community are meeting with one foot on the European continent and another in Asia to discuss all things MariaDB and MySQL and experience the mystery of the Orient.

At the meeting I had the opportunity to present my plans and visions for the future development of replication in MariaDB. My talk was very well received, and I had a lot of good discussions afterwards with many of the bright people here. Working from home in a virtual company, it means a lot to get this kind of inspiration and encouragement from others on occasion, and I am looking forward to continuing the work after an early flight to Copenhagen tomorrow.

The new interface for transaction coordinator plugins is what particularly interests me at the moment. The …

On Friday, October 15th, the third OpenSQLCamp in North America will start at 6pm with a social event and then continue with more technical stuff over the week end.
Compared to the overcrowded Oracle Open World with its 45,000 attendees, this event may look like a desert. But the quality of the attendance will more than compensate for the missing thousands.
The event will be held with unconference style. There is a list of sessions, where I have proposed two topics, one for which I would like to see someone stepping up and help defining the topic …

I recently worked on upgrading MySQL from one of very early MySQL 5.0 versions to Percona Server 5.1. This was a classical upgrade scenario which can cause surprises. Master and few slaves need to be upgraded. It is a shared database used by tons of applications written by many people over more than 5 years timeframe. It did not have any extensive test suite we could use for validation. As you might guess in such cases some of the original authors have moved on and nobody is exactly sure what application does or does not do with the database. Database is production critical with serious role in serious company so we can't just do a reckless upgrade

First we needed to do a sanity check on existing replication setup. As we're checking replication consistency down the road we need to make sure replication is in sync to begin with to avoid false …

Warning, the following is quite ugly, but does the job :)

A while back I needed to create an archive slave database from a half a terabyte myisam master and had space restrictions. I could not dump the db, load it, then drop keys (archive doesn’t support keys apart from a primary key on one column as of 5.1), alter engine etc (would take even longer than it took either way). So an ugly single liner came to mind and worked nicely too.

mysqldump -uuser -ppassword -h127.0.0.1 -P3306 dbname --master-data=1 | sed 's/ENGINE=MyISAM/ENGINE=archive/g' | grep -v '^ UNIQUE KEY' | grep -v '^ KEY' | perl -p0777i -e 's/,\n^\)/\n\)/mg' | mysql -uuser -ppassword -h127.0.0.1 -P3307 dbname

So what is it doing?
Broken down:
mysqldump -uuser -ppassword -h127.0.0.1 -P3306 dbname --master-data=1 –> extract the database with the master position
sed …

This week I was one of the presenters at the first Surge Scalability Conference in Baltimore. An event that focused not just on one technology but on what essential tools, technologies and practices system architects need to know about for successfully scaling web applications.

While MySQL is an important product in many environments, it is only one component for a successful technology stack and for many organizations is one of several products that manage your data.

My presentation was on the common MySQL scalability mistakes and how to avoid them. This is a problem/solution approach and is a companion talk with Successful MySQL Scalability which describes design for successfully scalability …

While working on a deployment we came across a nasty surprise. In hindsight it was avoidable, but it never crossed our minds it could happen. I'll share the experience so when you face a similar situation, you'll know what to expect.
ScenarioTo deploy the changes, we used a pair of servers configured to replicate with each other (master-master replication). There are many articles that describe how to perform an ALTER TABLE with minimum or no downtime using MySQL replication. The simple explanation is:

1. Set up a passive master of the database you want to modify the schema. 
2. Run the schema updates on the passive master.
3. Let replication to catch up once the schema modifications are done.
4. Promote the passive master as the new active master.

The details to make this work will depend on each individual situation and are too extensive for the purpose of this article. A …

I was recently struck by a problem which is unusual. In order to keep an eye on the database server I use nagios, cacti, merlin and some local scripts to monitor the database instance and ensure that it is working properly.  That normally works fine.  The different monitor processes do various things, one of which is to monitor the replication status of a slave, and warn me if the replication is not working or if it’s behind. This is done with the command SHOW SLAVE STATUS.

The server I was looking at runs some large local batch jobs aggregating data. Unfortunately, I was experiencing that replication was interfering with these batch jobs so decided to see if things would perform better if I stopped replication and let the batch …

Scenario: Master-Master replication
Description: Master A is the active db server whilst Master B is a read only swappable db server hence both are creating binary logs. During backup I run “FLUSH LOGS” in order to have a simpler point in time recovery procedure if that case arises.
Problem: Flush logs is mean mean command :) …. it rotates not only my binary logs but my error log too (since I user error-log=blahblahblah in my my.cnf). Well given I flush logs every night my error log is cycled through every night, but unlike binary logs which have an incrimental number attached to the fine, error logs only have a `-log` attached to the filename and a second “FLUSH LOG” would just clear all error logs permanently. That is really not fun believe me!

So what is the solution? you could either:
1. Not use “FLUSH LOGS” (nah that aint happenin)
2. Not use –error-log (that aint happenin either cos I need to …

We ran across the following error on a MySQL slave server recent: mysql> SHOW SLAVE STATUS \G <snip> Last_Error: Query caused different errors on master and slave. Error on master: 'Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction' (1213), Error on slave: 'no error' (0). Default database: '<database_name>'. Query: '<query>' <snip> In this […]

In posts on June 30 and July 6, I explained how implementing the commands “replace into” and “insert ignore” with TokuDB’s fractal trees data structures can be two orders of magnitude faster than implementing them with B-trees. Towards the end of each post, I hinted at that there are some caveats that complicate the story a little. On July 21st I explained one caveat, secondary keys, and on August 3rd, Rich explained another caveat. In this post, I explain the other …