The latest from the MySQL community

I am always fascinated by the cleanliness of UNIX. One tool only should do one thing, but it has to be the best in that way. The operating system itself will glue all the modules together and give you a complex feel of a system, you don’t have to take care of huge, bloated software, don’t have to deal with mysterious bugs, which are appearing random. Just small bricks of clever software and the rest are on you.

Recently I broke this, and frankly, I am not sure if it was a bad decision, or not.

With MySQL, if you want a point in time recovery after a disaster, you should back up not only the database but the binary logs themselves, as I have mentioned it in my last blog post. I added a feature to the binlogstreamer: it can clean up the binary logs after a given amount of time.

Let’s see how many ways we have to get rid of the old, unwanted …

Amazon EBS volumes come with a very cool feature called "lazy loading". In a nutshell: if a volume is created from an existing snapshot, it can become available almost immediately without waiting for all data to be restored. This allows for extremely fast provisioning of large data sets as long as you don't explicitly require the entire data set to be present before you start using it.
When an EBS volume is restored from snapshot, its blocks are fetched from Amazon S3. It happens either lazily in the background or explicitly on demand (think of a pagefault-like mechanism) and of course, fetching pieces of data from Amazon S3 is going to be one-two orders of magnitude slower than reading blocks directly from a volume.
In this short article, I will try to give you an idea of how this may impact the crash recovery time of your MySQL databases. Why talk about this? Depending on the workload and data set layout, crash recovery of a MySQL …

PinLater is an asynchronous job execution system we built as a replacement for our original solution based on Pyres. We’ve been using PinLater in production for over two years, and it’s one of our most mission critical systems. Usage of PinLater spans from core actions like Pinning, image thumbnail generation and when Pinners follow other Pinners, boards or topics, to larger batch operations like email delivery, push notifications and visual discovery workflows. We now operate more than 10 different clusters all on Amazon EC2. In aggregate, there are more than 500 job queues processing north of six million jobs per minute. Today we’re excited to announce PinLater as our latest …

I am always fascinated about the cleanliness  of UNIX . One tool only should do one thing, but it has to be the best in that way. The operating system itself will glue all the modules together and give you a complex feel of a system, you don’t have to take care of huge, bloated software, don’t […]

Choosing your HA topology

There are various ways to retain high availability with databases. You can use Virtual IPs (VRRP) to manage host availability, you can use resource managers like Zookeeper and Etcd to (re)configure your applications or use load balancers/proxies to distribute the workload over all available hosts.

The Virtual IPs need either an application to manage them (MHA, Orchestrator), some scripting (KeepaliveD, Pacemaker/Corosync) or an engineer to manually fail over and the decision making in the process can become complex. The Virtual IP failover is a straightforward and simple process by removing the IP address from one host, assigning it to another and use arping to send a gratuitous ARP response. In theory a Virtual IP can be moved in a second but it will take a few seconds before the failover management application is sure the host has failed and acts accordingly. In reality this should be …

The client library — libmysqlclient — is part of the same source code repository as the server. It comes both as a dynamic link library (.so), also called a shared library, and as a static link library (.a). During the 5.7 development cycle, we’ve made several improvements to the library, which has resulted in a bump from ABI version 18 to version 20.…

On Wednesday, December 9 at 11 AM ET, please join us and INetU for a special webinar about Best Practices for a High-Performing MySQL Database with VividCortex & INetU.

Baron Schwartz (VividCortex founder and CEO), Michele Corvino (INetU Product Manager), and Jim DeHart (INetU Systems Engineer) will be discussing best practices for keeping MySQL databases at peak performance. INetU – the best customer-rated cloud hosting company in the industry – knows the importance of keeping databases running without hitch. Complexity within systems increases as applications grow, which means that as complications arise, there are more risks for end users. Leveraging a database performance tool like VividCortex allows users to take care of …

In this blog article we will show you how to install AutoMySQLBackup on a Linux VPS. AutoMySQLBackup is very useful utility for creating daily, weekly or monthly backups of one or more MySQL databases from one of more MySQL servers. It dumps the databases and compress them in to archives.it comes with many features such as:   Email notification of backups   Backup Compression and Encryption   Configurable backup rotation   Incremental database backups As usual, log in to your server as user root ssh root@IP and execute the following command to make sure that all services ar up to […]

It goes without saying that crash recovery of busy MySQL servers (and many other RDBMS for that matter) is not an extremely quick process. In MySQL context, one of the worst case scenarios is when the server is used for multi-tenant application hosting i.e. when the MySQL instance contains hundreds or thousands of schemas and (tens/hundreds of) thousands of tablespaces. In such scenario, the server may spend a considerable amount of time in the tablespace discovery phase, during which MySQL builds a mapping between tablespace IDs and names of actual tablespace files on disk.
MySQL 5.7 promises to put an end to tablespace discovery. The documentation lists the following improvements introduced in versions 5.7.5 and up:

• Elimination of file system scans prior to redo log application. The MLOG_FILE_NAME redo log …

MySQL 5.7 is GA and has over than 150 new features. One of them is a Native JSON Data Type and JSON Functions: "Allows for efficient and flexible storage, search and manipulation of schema-less data. Enhancements include a new internal binary format, support for easy integration within SQL, and index management on the JSON Documents using generated columns".