Introduction

The purpose of this article is to describe how Galera Cluster multi-master replication provides high availability for MySQL beyond simply replicating all updates to multiple nodes.

High availability has multiple dimensions, such as being able to detect and tolerate failures in individual components and be able to recover quickly. We will discuss the different failure modes that can happen in a cluster and how Galera facilitates the detection and recovery from each situation.

Your load balancer and application may be governed by different timeouts and recovery mechanisms, but an operational Galera Cluster will provide a stable foundation to recover the rest of your infrastructure in case of a widespread outage.

Failures of Individual Nodes

Synchronous replication requires the participation of all nodes but a Galera Cluster will detect and automatically remove a node that has gone down within …

Cross-posted on Google Cloud Platform Blog.

Cloud native technologies like Kubernetes help you compose scalable services out of a sea of small logical units. In our last post, we introduced Vitess (an open-source project that powers YouTube's main database) as a way of turning MySQL into a scalable Kubernetes application. Our goal was to make scaling your persistent datastore in Kubernetes as simple as scaling stateless app servers - just run a single command to launch more …

Cross-posted on Google Cloud Platform Blog. Cloud native technologies like Kubernetes help you compose scalable services out of a sea of small logical units. In our last post, we introduced Vitess(an open-source project that powers YouTube's main database) as a way of turning MySQL into a scalable Kubernetes application. Our goal was to make scaling your persistent datastore in Kubernetes as simple as scaling stateless app servers - just run a single command to launch more pods.

If you are in San Francisco on October 27, 2015, please come along to our MySQL team reception at Jillian’s at Metreon. You do not require an Oracle OpenWorld pass to attend, all we ask is that you please register in advance.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Pythian DevOps services accelerate AWS adoption and delivery of innovative customer experiences

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – AWS RE:INVENT – October 6, 2015 – Pythian, a global IT services company specializing in helping companies adopt disruptive technologies to optimize revenue-generating systems, today announced it has achieved the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) DevOps Competency. As an addition to Pythian’s existing Advanced Consulting Partner status in the APN, the DevOps Competency further validates the company’s deep capabilities and demonstrated performance in helping customers transform their business to be more efficient and agile leveraging the AWS platform and DevOps principles, particularly around continuous integration, continuous delivery, and configuration management.

Pythian DevOps services use a documented maturity model and client-centric strategic planning process to …

“Scaling = replacing all components of a car while driving it at 100mph”

– Mike Krieger, Instagram Co-founder @ Airbnb OpenAir 2015

Airbnb peak traffic grows at a rate of 3.5x per year, with a seasonal summer peak.

Heading into the 2015 summer travel season, the infrastructure team at Airbnb was hard at work scaling our databases to handle the expected record summer traffic. One particularly impactful project aimed to partition certain tables by application function onto their own database, which typically would require a significant engineering investment in the form of application layer changes, data migration, and robust testing to guarantee data consistency with minimal downtime. In an attempt to save weeks of …

We remember when we first started auditing MySQL servers, there were very few tools available.  In one of our early big gigs, we were battling serious performance issues for a client.  At the time, tuning-primer.sh was about the only tool available that could be used to diagnose performance bottlenecks.  Fortunately, with a lot of manual interpolation of the raw data it presented, we were able to find the issue with the server and suggest how to resolve them.  For that we are very thankful.  It was a first step in analyzing MySQL status variables, minimizing the number of formulas to learn and calculate by hand.  Obviously doing it by hand takes forever!

Now fast-forward to today.  Unfortunately, not much has changed.  Many DBAs and developers are still using open source tools such as tuning-primer, mysqltuner.pl, mysqlreport, and so on.  Don’t get the wrong; those tools have …

As a MySQL support engineer, I see this so often, that I felt it could help to write a post about it.

Customers contact us to ask about replication lag – ie, a slave is very far behind the master, and not catching up. (“Very far” meaning hours behind.)

The most common reason I encounter is databases having InnoDB tables without explicit primary keys. Especially if you are using row-based replication (“RBR”), you want explicit primary keys on all your tables. Otherwise, MySQL will scan the entire table for each row that is updated. (See bug 53375 . )  Maybe I’m a relational purist, but why would you want to have tables without explicit primary keys, anyway?  (On the other, less-purist, hand, for performance reasons, sometimes a short surrogate PK may be preferred to a lengthy logical one. )

The other common reason is that the slave …

A week or two ago one of my former colleagues (at Percona) Jevin Real gave a talk titled Evolving Backups Strategy, Deploying pyxbackup at Percona Live 2015 in Amsterdam. I think Jervin raised some very good points about where MySQL backup solutions in general fall short. There are definitely a lot of tools and scripts out there that claim to do MySQL backups correctly, but don’t actually do it correctly. What I am more interested though is in measuring TwinDB against the points that Jervin highlighted to see if TwinDB falls short too.

Dependencies

We distribute TwinDB agent as a package that can be installed using the standard OS package management system. For example, using YUM on CentOS, RHEL and Amazon Linux, or using APT …

Thanks to everyone who joined us for our recent live webinar on ‘Replication Topology Changes for MySQL and MariaDB’ led by Krzysztof Książek, Senior Support Engineer at Severalnines. The replay and slides to the webinar are now available to watch and read online via the links below.

Watch the replay

Webinar: Replication Topology Changes for MySQL and MariaDB from Severalnines AB

Read the slides

Webinar slides: Replication Topology Changes for MySQL and MariaDB from …