The latest from the MySQL community

In Amazon space, any EC2 or Service instance can “disappear” at any time.  Depending on which service is affected, the service will be automatically restarted.  In EC2 you can choose whether an interrupted instance will be restarted, or left shutdown.

For an Aurora instance, an interrupted instance is always restarted. Makes sense.

The restart timing, and other consequences during the process, are noted in our post on Aurora Failovers.

Aurora Testing Limitations

As mentioned earlier, we love testing “uncontrolled” failovers.  That is, we want to be able to pull any plug on any service, and see that the environment as a whole continues to do its job.  We can’t do that with Aurora, because we can’t control the essentials:

• power button;
• reset switch;
…

This is part-4 of the Maxscale Blog series

1. Maxscale and Galera
2. Maxscale Basic Administration
3. Maxscale for Replication

Maxscale started supporting Amazon Aurora lately from its version 2.1 which comes with a BSL license, we are good until we use only 3 nodes, …

Open source is at the foundation of MySQL and the biggest and best part of open source is the legion of developers and users who use and contribute to our great product.  It has always been of incredible importance to us to interact with our friends in MySQL space and one of the great ways of doing that is via IRC (Internet Relay Chat) on #freenode.  While that still remains a great option many other systems have been developed that offer other advantages.  One of those is slack.

We wanted to create a slack space where our users could hang out, help each other, and interact with MySQL developers.  We’re in no way wanting to replace IRC but just wanting to make it even easier to solve your MySQL problems and learn about the many great things we are working on.

Head on over to http://mysqlcommunity.slack.com to join in on the fun!

MariaDB Connector/J 2.2.2 and 1.7.2 now available dbart Wed, 02/21/2018 - 11:40

The MariaDB project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of MariaDB Connector/J 2.2.2 and MariaDB Connector/J 1.7.2. See the release notes and changelogs for details and visit mariadb.com/downloads/connector to download.

Download MariaDB Connector/J 2.2.2

Release Notes Changelog …

In this blog post, I’ll look at how to make Percona XtraDB Cluster and SELinux work when used together.

Recently, I encountered an issue with Percona XtraDB Cluster startup. We tried to setup a three-node cluster using Percona XtraDB Cluster with a Vagrant CentOS box, but somehow node2 was not starting. I did not get enough information to debug the issue in the donor/joiner error log. I got only the following error message:

2018-02-08 16:58:48 7910 [Note] WSREP: Running: 'wsrep_sst_xtrabackup-v2 --role 'joiner' --address '192.168.100.20' --datadir '/var/lib/mysql/' --defaults-file '/etc/my.cnf' --defaults-group-suffix '' --parent '7910' --binlog 'mysql-bin' '
2018-02-08 16:58:48 7910 [ERROR] WSREP: Failed to …

The conference session schedule for the seventh annual Percona Live 2018 Open Source Database Conference, taking place April 23-25 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA is now live and available for review! Advance Registration Discounts can be purchased through March 4, 2018, 11:30 p.m. PST.

Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 is the premier open source database event. With a theme of “Championing Open Source Databases,” the conference will feature multiple tracks, including MySQL, MongoDB, Cloud, PostgreSQL, Containers and Automation, Monitoring and Ops, and Database Security. Once again, Percona will be …

Databases usually work in a secure environment. It may be a datacenter with a dedicated VLAN for database traffic. It may be a VPC in EC2. If your network spreads across multiple datacenters in different regions, you’d usually use some kind of Virtual Private Network or SSH tunneling to connect these locations in a secure manner. With data privacy and security being hot topics these days, you might feel better with an additional layer of security.

MySQL supports SSL as a means to encrypt traffic both between MySQL servers (replication) and between MySQL servers and clients. If you use Galera cluster, similar features are available - both intra-cluster communication and connections with clients can be encrypted using SSL.

A common way of implementing SSL encryption is to use self-signed certificates. Most of the time, it is not necessary to purchase an SSL certificate issued by the Certificate Authority. Anybody who’s been …

How it happened

A few years ago I started thinking about refactoring MySQL-Sandbox. I got lots of ideas and a name for the project (dbdeployer) but went no further. The initial idea (this was 2013!) was to rewrite the project in Ruby: I had been using Ruby at work and it looked like a decent replacement for Perl. My main problem was the difficulty of installation in an uncontrolled environment. If you have control over your environment (it's your laptop or you are in charge of the server configuration via Puppet or similar) then the task is easy. But if you ever need to deploy somewhere with little or no notice, it becomes a problem: there are servers where Perl is not installed, and is common that the server also have a policy forbidding all scripting languages from being deployed. …

Right now Aurora only allows a single master, with up to 15 read-only replicas.

Master/Replica Failover

We love testing failure scenarios, however our options for such tests with Aurora are limited (we might get back to that later).  Anyhow, we told the system, through the RDS Aurora dashboard, to do a failover. These were our observations:

Role Change Method

Both master and replica instances are actually restarted (the MySQL uptime resets to 0).

This is quite unusual these days, we can do a fully controlled role change in classic asynchronous replication without a restart (CHANGE MASTER TO …), and Galera doesn’t have read/write roles as such (all instances are technically writers) so it doesn’t need role changes at all.

Failover Timing

Failover between running instances takes about 30 seconds.  This is in line with information provided in the …

In this blog post, I will look at the new dashboards in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) for Prometheus exporters.

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) uses Prometheus exporters to capture metrics data from the system it monitors. Those Prometheus exporters are an important part of your monitoring infrastructure, and understanding their performance and other operational details is critical for well-implemented monitoring.    

To help you with this we’ve added a number of new dashboards to Percona Monitoring and Management.

The Prometheus Exporters Overview dashboard provides a high-level overview of your installed Prometheus exporter …