The Brainiac Corner is a format where we talk with some of the smartest minds in the system, database, devops, and IT world. If you have opinions on pirates, or anything else related, please don’t hesitate to contact us. 

Katherine Daniels is an operations engineer at Etsy who got her start in programming with TI-80 calculators back when Geocities was still cool, and these days has opinions on things like ‘the cloud’ and ‘devops’. She lives in Brooklyn with a perfectly reasonable number of cats, and in her spare time can often be found homebrewing, rock-climbing, or hand crafting knitted server koozies for the data center.

How did you get from stork to brainiac (i.e. what do you do today and how did you get there)?

I started out playing around with computers and …

We manage hundreds of servers and have a need to add and remove DBAs, application developers, and so on regularly. Doing this manually is just beyond the scope of what we can realistically manage. Since we are already using LDAP, we wanted to find a way to integrate it with MySQL.

After reading many, many articles and getting diverse opinions as to whether or not it was even possible, we decided to give it a try. From what we read, it appears that MySQL Enterprise edition does exactly what we want; unfortunately, we don’t have an Enterprise support contract ruling that out as an option. Knowing that Percona tends to mimic many of the Enterprise features, we decided to pursue doing this with Percona Server. Further reading showed this could be possible with the PAM plugin which would then authenticate via LDAP. A little indirect, but seemed like our only solution.

Since MySQL does not provide a community version of its LDAP …

With the imminent release of ProxySQL as stable version, and its presentation at PerconaLive Amsterdam , I decide to write few blog posts to describe how to install, configure and use it without digging too much through documentation.
Moreover, practical examples are often easier to understand.

This tutorial is a long one, although none of the topics are discussed in details to avoid making it even longer (or boring).

For this tutorial, we will use a small setup with 4 nodes:
- node1 (192.168.124.101) , mysql master
- node2 (192.168.124.102) , mysql slave
- node3 (192.168.124.103) , mysql slave
- app (192.168.124.104) , application server where proxysql will also run


Replication setup
Without going into …

Several reports we’re published in the news about how easy it is to access data stored in some NoSQL systems, including MongoDB. This is not surprising because security was rather relaxed in earlier versions of MongoDB . This post lists some of the common vulnerabilities in MongoDB and Percona TokuMX.

Network Security

One key point is to ensure that the bind_ip setting is correctly adjusted: in MongoDB 2.4 and Percona TokuMX, it is not set which means that the server will listen to all available network interfaces. If proper firewall rules (iptables, Security Groups in AWS, …) are not in place, your dataset could easily be queried from anywhere in the world!

In MongoDB 2.6+, bind_ip is set by default to 127.0.0.1 in the official .deb and .rpm packages. This is great from a security point of view, but remember that you’ll still have to adjust the setting if the application servers are not …

Thanks to all who attended my webinar last week on Writing Application Code for MySQL High Availability.  This blog is for me to address the extra questions I didn’t have time to answer on the stream.

What do you think about using Galera Cluster but writing to a single Node with LVS ?

Whatever HA strategy you like that can present  a layer 3 or layer 4 to your application tier is fine.  A lot of people using PXC us it in a single-writer (master/slave) kind of way.

Is there any way we can determine slave lag and then decide to use weather master or slave? for e.g. instead of using query to find if data is available in slave then …. use if lag_time < xyz?

One of my main points was that this is usually more expensive to implement inside your application code than it …

By my count MySQL 5.7 added over 150 new features, and some of my favourite ones are based on community ideas and contributions:

1. Statement Timeout (contributed by Davi Arnaut)
2. Disabled Storage Engines (suggested by the community)
3. MySQL Command Line client Ctrl+C support fixed (bug reported by the community)
4. Barracuda + Dynamic row format enabled by default (change made to better support WordPress and …

In our previous post, we showed you how to interpret reports generated by pt-query-digest. Today we’d like to cover some of its more advanced features, as it is a pretty extensive tool with lots of functionality. We’ll also show you what information you should be looking for, and how to derive conclusions based on that data. 

This is the eleventh installment in the ‘Become a MySQL DBA’ blog series. Our previous posts in the DBA series include Analyzing SQL Workload with pt-query-digest, Query Tuning Process, …

The Sakila sample database was created almost 10 years ago, as a sample set of data for MySQL courses and examples.

The database was developed by MySQL employees, with substantial contributions form the community.

Recently, the database was updated to use some of the features in MySQL 5.7. As a result, we had two sets of samples, one to use with MySQL 5.0+, and one that only loads with MySQL 5.7.

I filed a feature request, offering a patch to use conditional schema and data changes, which was incorporated very quickly into the official release.

The current release, available within the …

Today, at the Strata Conference in Santa Clara, Calpont Corporation announced that it is changing its name to InfiniDB, Inc., and that it has raised another $7.5M in funding. So “What’s in a name?” you ask?  For InfiniDB, a lot, actually. Since its introduction in 2010, the InfiniDB database has delivered exceptional scaling and speed, […]

All ad earnings on heidisql.com from September 01 up to the rest of the year, namely December 31 2015, will be donated to the refugees help operation Aktion Deutschland hilft!

This way I want to support the huge help operation for the refugees of the Syrian Civil War.