A few months ago, we featured Charity Majors, the production engineering manager for Parse at Facebook, on Brainiac Corner. We are featuring Charity and her expertise once again. This time, though, she is reviewing VividCortex: from installation to problem solving to a feature wishlist.

One of our favorite takeaways: “And VividCortex is a DB monitoring system built by database experts. They know what information you are going to need to diagnose problems, whether you know it or not. It’s like having a half a DBA on your team.” And without further ado…

Parse review of VividCortex

Many years ago, when I was but a wee lass trying to upgrade mysql and having a terrible time with performance regressions, Baron and the newly-formed Percona team helped me figure my shit out. The Percona toolset …

A few months ago, we featured Charity Majors, the production engineering manager for Parse at Facebook, on Brainiac Corner. We are featuring Charity and her expertise once again. This time, though, she is reviewing VividCortex: from installation to problem solving to a feature wishlist.

One of our favorite takeaways: “And VividCortex is a DB monitoring system built by database experts. They know what information you are going to need to diagnose problems, whether you know it or not. It’s like having a half a DBA on your team.” And without further ado…

Parse review of VividCortex

Many years ago, when I was but a wee lass trying to upgrade mysql and having a terrible time with performance regressions, Baron and the newly-formed Percona team helped me figure my shit out. The Percona toolset …

Recently I have been using Ansible and Vagrant to test the MySQL 5.7 release candidates but several of you asked about using Docker. The hardest part of this process will be installing Docker on your operating system of choice and that is fairly easy. I am using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and the installation was a wget command.

Next comes the magic. Docker will download the MySQL 5.7.8-rc image if it is not already loaded locally and then start it.
docker run -p 3306:3306 --name mysql -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORRD=secret -d mysql:5.7.8-rc
The quick translation of the above is that we are telling Docker to set up a container named mysql on port 3306 using a password of secret, run all this as a daemon using MySQL version 5.7.8-rc.

And MySQL 5.7.8-rc is running. But to find it you will have to ask Docker where the server is running.
…

In this article, I will describe how you can monitor your Debian 8 server with Munin and Monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server without much configuration, whereas Monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that let you recognize current or upcoming problems, and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

I’m excited to be at LinuxCon North America in Seattle next week (August 17-19 2015). I’ve spoken at many LinuxCon events, and this one won’t be any different. Part of the appeal of the conference is being able to visit a new place every year.

MariaDB Corporation will have a booth, so you’ll always be able to see friendly Rod Allen camped there. In between talks and meetings, there will also be Max Mether and quite possibly all the other folk that live in Seattle (Kolbe Kegel, Patrick Crews, Gerry Narvaja).

For those in the database space, don’t forget to come attend some of our talks (represented by …

The latest MySQL Sandbox, version 3.0.66 is out. It has a few new features (as always, when I find myself doing the same thing many times, I script it) and improved support for latest releases of MySQL. You can now install, among other versions, MySQL 5.7.8 and MariaDB 10.1.x

Some notable additions in this release are in the scripts that are created and customized for each sandbox. There are many of them and when one more arrives, it's easy to overlook it. So, here are the new arrivals.



./show_binlog
When I am troubleshooting replication behavior, I often need to inspect the latest binary log. The sandbox has a shortcut that gives me the right version of mysqlbinlog for the deployment:

A database server needs CPU, memory, disk and network in order to function. Understanding these resources is important for a DBA, as any resource that is weak or overloaded can become a limiting factor and cause the database server to perform poorly. A main task of the DBA is to tune operating system and database configurations and avoid overutilization or underutilization of the available resources.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss some of the settings that are most often tweaked and which can bring you significant improvement in the performance. We will also cover some of the variables which are frequently modified even though they should not. Performance tuning is not easy, but you can go a surprisingly long way with a few basic guidelines.
 
This is the eighth installment in the ‘Become a MySQL DBA’ blog series. Our previous posts in the DBA series include …

So far, the early drama of the 2016 presidential race has been more silly than substantial. Donald Trump has been a (successful?!) one-man show, Hillary has been playing coy, some candidates have been getting trolled (much to Reddit’s delight), and, this week, Fox News has announced its first Republican debate line-up, which somehow seems more akin to the guest list for a popular 7th grader’s slumber party than presidential grooming. But there’s been one topic of conversation that’s been deadly serious and that is sure to stay on people’s minds: campaign finance.

Incredibly vast sums of money are now …

So far, the early drama of the 2016 presidential race has been more silly than substantial. Donald Trump has been a (successful?!) one-man show, Hillary has been playing coy, some candidates have been getting trolled (much to Reddit’s delight), and, this week, Fox News has announced its first Republican debate line-up, which somehow seems more akin to the guest list for a popular 7th grader’s slumber party than presidential grooming. But there’s been one topic of conversation that’s been deadly serious and that is sure to stay on people’s minds: campaign finance.

Incredibly vast sums of money are now …

Years ago I pursued my interest in InnoDB’s architecture and design, and became impressed with its sophistication. Another way to say it is that InnoDB is complicated, as are all MVCC databases. However, InnoDB manages to hide the bulk of its complexity entirely from most users.

I decided to at least outline a book on InnoDB. After researching it for a while, it became clear that it would need to be a series of books in multiple volumes, with somewhere between 1000 and 2000 pages total.

At one time I actually understood a lot of this material, but I have forgotten most of it now.

I did not begin writing. Although it is incomplete, outdated, and in some cases wrong, I share the outline here in case anyone is interested. It might be of particular interest to someone who thinks it’s an easy task to write a new …