As we saw in the first part of this blog, a strongly consistent database cluster like Galera does not play well with container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or Swarm. We showed you how to deploy Galera and configure process management for Docker, so you retain full control of the behaviour.  This blog post is the continuation of that, we are going to look into operation and maintenance of the cluster.

To recap some of the main points from the part 1 of this blog, we deployed a three-node Galera cluster, with ProxySQL and Keepalived on three different Docker hosts, where all MariaDB instances run as Docker containers. The following diagram illustrates the final deployment:

Graceful Shutdown

To perform a graceful MySQL shutdown, the best way is to send SIGTERM …

GitHub uses MySQL as its main datastore for all things non-git, and its availability is critical to GitHub’s operation. The site itself, GitHub’s API, authentication and more, all require database access. We run multiple MySQL clusters serving our different services and tasks. Our clusters use classic master-replicas setup, where a single node in a cluster (the master) is able to accept writes. The rest of the cluster nodes (the replicas) asynchronously replay changes from the master and serve our read traffic.

The availability of master nodes is particularly critical. With no master, a cluster cannot accept writes: any writes that need to be persisted cannot be persisted. Any incoming changes such as commits, issues, user creation, reviews, new repositories, etc., would fail.

To support writes we clearly need to have an available writer node, a master of a cluster. But just as important, we need …

We are really excited about MySQL 8.0 new features (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-nutshell.html) and our consultants spend several hours weekly, testing new features and doing research on how best we can create value for our customers from having those in production. Being an pure-play MySQL consulting, support and remote DBA services company, We are fully accountable for our customer database infrastructure operations performance, scalability, high availability and reliability.  As we are aggressive about gaining maximum results from MySQL 8 investments made by our customers, We are equally conservative (our customer data reliability is critical for us !)  on adopting new features, until we are fully confident after several rounds of testing (at different scales on multiple platforms) and technical review (we engage both internal and …

As you know, one of the great new feature in MySQL 8.0 is the Document Store. Now with MySQL you can store your JSON documents in collections and manage them using CRUD operations. NoSQL is now part of MySQL ! Instead of a mix of MongoDB and MySQL, now you can eliminate MongoDB and consolidate with MySQL !

This is a historical meeting of NoSQL and SQL in the same database server!

To use MySQL 8.0 as Document Store, you need to have the X plugin installed (by default since 8.0.11). This plugin enables the X DevAPI that offers a modern programming interface. Clients that communicate with a …

This time we will look at the differences in updating records between MongoDB and the MySQL Document Store.  Syntactically they are pretty different.  I am still following the Getting Started With MongoDB article for example queries.

Updating Records
In Mongo we update thusly:
> db.restaurants.update(
... { "name" : "Juni" },
... {
...  $set: { "cuisine" : "American (new)" },
...  $currentDate: { "lastModified" : true }
... }
... )
WriteResult({ "nMatched" : 1, "nUpserted" : 0, "nModified" : 1 })
>

The same update in the MySQL Document Store can be a lot different.  We could update using SQL or NoSQL.  I would like to update the document with the change to the cuisine and …

Occasionally we have customers with MyISAM storage engine approaching us to migrate their database to InnoDB, MyISAM is great if you are just an application like web content management system with no multi-user concurrency challenges but what if you are building an highly transactional data web property ? InnoDB is much preferred for such situations, InnoDB provides Row-level locking (Oracle like) for consistent reads on an multi-user concurrent user high performance database application. InnoDB also guarantees maximum data integrity by supporting FOREIGN KEY, We captured below few interesting points to remember while migrating your database from MyISAM to InnoDB :

• Data of InnoDB tables is stored in *.ibd files, deleting those files will permanently corrupt your database
• InnoDB tables consumes more storage space than MyISAM tables .
• Unlike MyISAM, InnoDB is a transactional database engine. In any typical MyISAM …

What is ChatOps?

Nowadays, we make use of multiple communication channels to manage or receive information from our systems, such as email, chat and applications among others. If we could centralize this in one or just a few different possible applications, and even better, if we could integrate it with tools that we currently use in our organization, we would be able to automate processes, improve our work dynamics and communication, having a clearer picture of the current state of our system. In many companies, Slack or other collaboration tools is becoming the centre and the heart of the development and ops teams.

What is ChatBot?

A chatbot is a program that simulates a conversation, receiving entries made by the user and returns answers based on its programming.

Some products have been developed with this technology, that allow us to perform administrative tasks, or keeps the team up to date on the current …

MariaDB DBAs are accountable for auditing database infrastructure operations to proactively troubleshoot performance and operational issues, MariaDB Audit Plugin is capable of auditing the database operations of both MariaDB and MySQL. MariaDB Audit Plugin is provided as a dynamic library: server_audit.so (server_audit.dll for Windows).  The plugin must be located in the plugin directory, the directory containing all plugin libraries for MariaDB.

MariaDB [(none)]> select @@plugin_dir; 
+--------------------------+
| @@plugin_dir             |
+--------------------------+
| /usr/lib64/mysql/plugin/ |
+--------------------------+
1 row in set (0.000 sec)

There are two ways you can install MariaDB Audit Plugin:

INSTALL SONAME statement while logged into MariaDB, You need to use administrative account which has INSERT privilege for the mysql.plugin table.

MariaDB [(none)]> INSTALL SONAME 'server_audit'; …

In this article I will explain the partial update optimizations for smaller (LOBs) in InnoDB. Small here qualifies the size of the modification and not the size of the LOB.  For some background information about the partial update feature, kindly go through our previous posts on this (here, here and here).…

Modern applications often feature the use of data in many different languages. This is often true even of applications that only offer a user facing interface in a single language. Many users may, for example, need to enter names which, although using Latin characters, feature diacritics; in other cases, they may need to enter text which contains Chinese or Japanese characters. Even if a user is capable of using an application localized for only one language, it may be necessary to deal with data from a wide variety of languages.

Additionally, increased use of mobile phones has lead to changes in communications behaviour; this includes a vastly increased use of standardized characters intended to convey emotions, often called “emojis” or “emoticons.” Originally, such information was conveyed using ASCII text, such as “:-)” to indicate happiness – but, as noted, this has changed, with many devices automatically converting such …