“Shard. Or do not shard. There is no try.”
                                          - Yoda

This is a technical dive into how we split our data across many MySQL servers. We finished launching this sharding approach in early 2012, and it’s still the system we use today to store our core data.

Before we discuss how to split the data, let’s be intimate with our data. Mood lighting, chocolate covered strawberries, Star Trek quotes…

Pinterest is a discovery engine for everything that interests you. From a data perspective, Pinterest is the largest human curated interest graph in the world. There are more than 50 billion Pins that have been saved by Pinners onto one billion boards. People repin and like other Pins (roughly a shallow copy), follow other Pinners, boards and interests, and …

In order to make it easier to work with data stored as binary strings (BINARY/VARBINARY) we are considering extending the &,|,^,~,> operators, to accept any-size binary strings and return binary string data as response. This can be useful for several complex data types not covered by the basic SQL data types (e.g. working with IPV6 addresses, manipulating UUID, etc).

Motivation

Let’s say we’re interested in getting all the networks that contain the given IP address. With ipv4 the common practice is to store the IP addresses as INT and execute:

SELECT inet_ntoa(network) AS network, inet_ntoa(netmask) AS netmask FROM network_table WHERE (inet_aton('192.168.0.30') & netmask) = network;

At the moment you are not able to do the same with ipv6 because inet6_aton('2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334') & netmask converts both operands from VARBINARY to BIGINT resulting in data truncation and …

We already have seen two articles for setting up MySQL Monitoring with Nagios and Percona Monitoring Tools for Nagios. Those posts covers configuration of nagios on single instance. Though following…

The post How to Add Remote MySQL Server to Nagios Monitoring first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

In MySQL QA Episode #12, “MySQL is Crashing, now what?,” Roel demonstrated how to collect crash-related information that will help Percona discover what the issue is that you are experiencing, and fix it.

As a Support Engineer I (Sveta) am very happy to see this post – but as a person who better understands writing than recording – I’d like to have same information, in textual form. We discussed it, and decided to do a joint blog post. Hence, this post

If you haven’t seen the video yet, or you do not have any experience with gdb, core files and crashes, I highly recommend to watch it first.

Once you have an idea of why crashes happen, what to do after it happens in your environment, and how to open a  …

MySQL Fabric: Setup Checklists

MySQL Fabric is an open-source solution released by the MySQL Engineering team at 
Oracle. It is an extensible and easy to use system for managing a MySQL deployment 
for Sharding  and High-availability.

This handles machines, multiple servers in different platforms. The usability, recovery, 
stability of MySQL Fabric is much more required as it is a complete distributed system. 
The setup of MySQL fabric involves servers,database, group details, shard details. So we 
need to ensure the fabric setup using below checklists.

Pre-Installation Checklist:

Query tuning is something that a DBA does on a daily basis - analyse queries and updates, how these interact with the data and schema, and optimize for performance. This is an extremely important task as this is where database performance can be significantly improved - sometimes by orders of magnitude. 

In the next few posts, we will cover the basics of query tuning - indexing, what types of queries to avoid, optimizer hints, EXPLAIN and execution plans, schema tips, and so on. We will start, though, by discussing the process of query review - how to gather data and which methods are the most efficient.

This is the ninth installment in the 'Become a MySQL DBA' blog series. Our previous posts in the DBA series include Configuration Tuning, …

Previous episodes:

• MySQL replication monitoring 101

MySQL replication in action - Part 1: GTID & CoMySQL replication in action - Part 2 - Fan-in topology


In the previous article, we saw the basics of establishing replication from multiple origins to the same destination. By extending that concept, we can deploy more complex topologies, such as the point-to-point (P2P) all-masters topology, a robust and fast …

The following passage is excerpted from the VividCortex eBook The Strategic IT Manager’s Guide to Building a Scalable DBA Team, by Baron Schwatrz. This eBook offers Baron’s expert insights and opinions on how top-performing companies manage vast amounts of data, while keeping it secure, available, and performant. The highlighted section examines how a company can look to its DBAs for clues about its greater IT systems, and what these clues might mean about the company in a larger sense. Consider why “DBAs are the canaries in the coal mine” and what you should do with the very valuable information their experiences yield.

To read more from this eBook, you can download a free copy here.

Why DBAs are Canaries in the Coal Mine

If yours is a data-driven organization, your DBAs probably …

Why DBAs are Canaries in the Coal Mine

If yours is a data-driven organization, your DBAs probably face significant challenges to executing effectively. These typically include the following:

• The scale and growth of the data. You know that data is big and growing fast, but you might not realize that DBAs are often expected to handle it without an increase in resources. In other words, the data-to-human ratio is growing rapidly.

• Emerging technologies, which often lack the mature tools DBAs rely on for productivity.

• The diversity and complexity of databases and application architectures. Polyglot persistence means that DBAs can’t manage a single set of technologies with a single set of tools. And modern applications are almost always distributed with clustering and replication across large numbers …

I am working on New features in Performance Schema 5.7 in action tutorial for Percona Live Amsterdam for quite a time already. Probably since version 5.7.3 when instrumentation for metadata locks were introduced and which I presented as a teaser in my combined "General MySQL Troubleshooting" and "Troubleshooting MySQL Performance" seminar I did in South Korea for Oracle University (for 5.6 that time).

In version 5.7.6 instrumentation for variables and status variables were introduced. It supports session, global and user variables. I was very happy to see this addition, especially because …