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 …

Our clients operate on a variety of platforms, and RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service) Aurora has received quite a bit of attention in recent times. On behalf of our clients, we look beyond the marketing, and see what the technical architecture actually delivers.  We will address specific topics in individual posts, this time checking out what the Aurora architecture means for write and caching behaviour (and thus performance).

What is RDS Aurora?

First of all, let’s declare the baseline.  MySQL Aurora is not a completely new RDBMS. It comprises a set of Amazon modifications on top of stock Oracle MySQL 5.6 and 5.7, implementing a different replication mechanism and some other changes/additions.  While we have some information (for instance from the “deep dive” by AWS VP Anurag Gupta), the source code of the Aurora modifications …

In this blog, we’ll look at how queries in systems with parallel processing can return rows in a non-deterministic order (and how to fix it).

Short story:

Do not rely on the order of your rows if your query does not use

ORDER BY

. Even with

ORDER BY

, rows with the same values can be sorted differently. To fix this issue, always add

ORDER BY ... ID

 when you have

LIMIT N

.

Long story:

While playing with MariaDB ColumnStore and Yandex ClickHouse, I came across a very simple case. In MariaDB ColumnStore and …

Two years ago Ovais Tariq had explained in detail what kinds of problems existed before MySQL introduced metadata locks in 5.5.3 and how these locks help to prevent them. Still, some implications of metadata locking in MySQL remain unclear for users – DBAs and even software developers that target recent MySQL versions. I’ve decided to include a slide or two into the presentation about InnoDB locks and deadlocks I plan to make (with my colleague Nilnandan Joshi) on April 16 at Percona Live 2015.

I decided to do this as …

The SQL language is a bit like a toolkit for data. It consists of lots of little fiddly bits of syntax that, taken together, allow you to build complex edifices and return powerful results. For the uninitiated, the many tools can be quite confusing, and it's sometimes difficult to decide how to go about the process of building non-trivial queries, that is, queries that are more than a simple SELECT a, b FROM c;

A System for Building Queries

When you're building queries, you could use a system like the following: 

1. Decide which fields contain the values you want to use in our output, and how you wish to alias those fields
   1. Values you want to see in your output
   2. Values you want to use in calculations . For example, to calculate margin on a product, you could calculate price - cost and give it the alias margin.
   3. Values you want …

This is the title of my first blog post on MySQL Performance Blog. It deals with a customer case where the customer was facing a peculiar problem where the rows column in the EXPLAIN output of the query was totally off. The actual number of rows was 18 times more than the number of rows reported by MySQL in the output of EXPLAIN. Now this can be a real pain as MySQL uses “the number of rows” estimation to pick and choose indexes and it could really be picking up a wrong index simply because of the wrong estimate. You...

The post When EXPLAIN estimates can go wrong! appeared first on ovais.tariq.

As I'm mostly using Oracle for work projects, the concept of the DUAL dummy table has become quite intuitive. I hardly ever think about the days when I was playing around with that table to find out its purpose (e.g. writing into it when DUAL was still a physical object, and thus killing the whole … Continue reading SQL Trouble with dummy tables →

A SELECT statement with COUNT returns the number of rows retrieved by the SELECT statement (see mysql select count). For performance reasons, the desired result is to limit that count. Including a LIMIT clause in the SELECT statement will not work since it only restricts the number of rows returned, which is always one. The […]

While learning a new ORDER BY syntax recently, as a diligent architect/DBA I reviewed the documentation. What I also found in the SELECT syntax which I did not also know was the keyword DUMPFILE.

The SELECT Syntax from MySQL 5.1 Manual states:

If you use INTO DUMPFILE instead of INTO OUTFILE, MySQL writes only one row into the file, without any column or line termination and without performing any escape processing. This is useful if you want to store a BLOB value in a file.

It’s a shame there is no middle ground, where you get the features of OUTFILE (i.e. all rows), and the features of DUMPFILE (i.e. no heading)

A colleague at work asked me “how can I run a case sensitive select on a case insensitive table?” out of curiosity and for a moment I hesitated, then said, yeah why not :) ….

Below are two different approaches (one of which is quite inefficient) and if anyone has another way, better or worse, please do leave a comment with your suggested approach :).

Cheers,
Darren

Preparation


mysql [localhost] {root} (test) > create table t1(a varchar(20));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

mysql [localhost] {root} (test) > insert into t1 (a) values ('darren');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql [localhost] {root} (test) > insert into t1 (a) values ('Darren');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql [localhost] {root} (test) > insert into t1 (a) values ('DarRen');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 …