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Displaying posts with tag: Michael Coburn (reset)
Q&A: High availability when using MySQL in the cloud

Last week I hosted a webinar on using MySQL in the cloud for High Availability (HA) alongside 451 Research analyst Jason Stamper. You can watch the recording and also download the slides (free) here. Just click the “Register” button at the end of that page.

We had several excellent questions and we didn’t have time to get to several of them in the allotted time. I’m posting them here along with the answers. Feel free to ask follow-up questions in the comments below.

Q: Can the TokuDB engine be used in a PXC environment?

A: No, TokuDB cannot currently be used in a PXC environment, the only supported engine in …

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High availability using MySQL in the cloud

Next Wednesday (June 10) I’ll be co-presenting a webinar on using MySQL in the cloud for High Availability (HA). Joining me will be 451 Research analyst Jason Stamper and together we’ll talk about the realities of HA using MySQL in the cloud and how vendors are responding to changing application requirements with new developments that can enhance your deployment.

We’ll also present a comparison of available solutions along with key best practices you can follow for successfully attaining HA in the cloud with MySQL. The webinar is scheduled for June 10 at 10 a.m. Pacific. Register here.

Together we’ll cover:

  • What do HA MySQL deployments in the cloud look like …
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Illustrating Primary Key models in InnoDB and their impact on disk usage

On a recent engagement I worked with a customer who makes extensive use of UUID() values for their Primary Key and stores it as char(36), and their row count on this example table has grown to over 1 billion rows.

The table is INSERT-only (no UPDATEs or DELETEs), and the bulk of their retrieval are PK lookups. Lookups by PK were performing acceptably, but they were concerned with the space usage by the table as we were approaching 1TB (running with innodb_file_per_table=1 and Percona Server 5.5).

This schema model presents an increasing burden for backups since they use Percona XtraBackup, and so the question was asked: does their choice of an effectively random Primary Key based on UUID() impact their on-disk storage, and to what extent? And as a neat trick I show towards the end of this post how you can calculate the …

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Using Percona Cloud Tools to solve real-world MySQL problems

For months when speaking with customers I have been positioning Percona Cloud Tools (PCT) as a valuable tool for the DBA/Developer/SysAdmin but only recently have I truly been able to harness the data and make a technical recommendation to a customer that I feel would have been very difficult to accomplish otherwise.

Let me provide some background: I was tasked with performing a Performance Audit for one of our customers (Performance Audits are extremely popular as they allow you to have a MySQL Expert confirm or reveal challenges within your MySQL environment and make your database run faster!) and as part of our …

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Using sysbench 0.5 for performing MySQL benchmarks

Given the recent excitement & interest around OpenStack I wanted to make sure I was ready to conduct appropriate evaluations of system performance.  I generally turn to sysbench since it comes with a variety of different tests (accessed via –test= option interface), including:

  • fileio – File I/O test
  • cpu – CPU performance test
  • memory – Memory functions speed test
  • threads – Threads subsystem performance test
  • mutex – Mutex performance test

As you can see, sysbench lets you stress many of the fundamental components of your hardware and infrastructure, such as your disk subsystem, along with your CPUs and memory. An additional option exists that is designed to perform synthetic stress testing of MySQL, and I was surprised when I didn’t see it in the above list on version 0.5, as it used to show up as “oltp – OLTP test”. What happened to …

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Using MySQL triggers and views in Amazon RDS

I recently had an opportunity to migrate a customer from a physical server into Amazon’s RDS environment. In this particular case the customers’ platform makes extensive use of MySQL triggers and views.  I came across two significant issues that prevented me from following Amazon’s documentation, which basically states “use mysqldump” but doesn’t call out a specific method of dealing with MySQL triggers and views.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a great platform if you’re looking for complete hands-off management of your MySQL environment, but comes at a cost in the area of flexibility, i.e. you don’t have SUPER privilege and this brings up additional challenges.

  1. You need to ensure you set log_bin_trust_function_creators=1 ( by default this is off, 0).
  2. You need to clean up your mysqldump syntax.

#1 is easy, you simply make a configuration change …

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Implementing SchemaSpy in your MySQL environment

Lately I have been working with a set of customers on a longer term basis which has given me time to explore new tools using their environments.  One tool that I am finding very helpful is called SchemaSpy.

SchemaSpy is a Java-based tool (requires Java 5 or higher) that analyzes the metadata of a schema in a database and generates a visual representation of it in a browser-displayable format. It lets you click through the hierarchy of database tables via child and parent table relationships as represented by both HTML links and entity-relationship diagrams. It’s also designed to help resolve the obtuse errors that a database sometimes gives related to failures due to constraints.

One of the …

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Showing entries 1 to 7