Ever wondered how hosting companies manage their MySQL database architecture? At Hostinger, we have various MySQL setups starting from the standalone replica-less instances to Percona XtraDB Cluster (later just PXC), ProxySQL routing-based and even absolutely custom and unique solutions which I’m going to describe in this blog post.

We do not have elephant-sized databases for internal services like API, billing, and clients. Thus almost every decision ends up with high availability as a top priority instead of scalability.

Still, scaling vertically is good enough for our case, as the database size does not exceed 500GB. One and the top requirements is the ability to access the master …

Percona latest blog poll asks how you currently host applications and databases. Select an option below, or leave a comment to clarify your deployment!

With the increased need for environments that respond more quickly to changing business demands, many enterprises are moving to the cloud and hosted deployments for applications and software in order to offload development and maintenance overhead to a third party. The database is no exception. Businesses are turning to using database as a service (DBaaS) to handle their data needs.

DBaaS provides some obvious benefits:

• Offload physical infrastructure to another vendor. It is the responsibility of whoever is providing the DBaaS service to maintain the physical environment – including hardware, software and best …

Developing a prototype, I found myself wanting a trustworthy cloud provider. Having heard of Openshift, I got my hands on it. It's Red Hat's Platform as a Service. With it, you can host and scale applications in a cloud environment. As a developer I found some wonderful features on the quite generous free tier. The ones I'd like to highlight are that:

It's based on a gear and cartridge

I think MariaDB has had a great few weeks recently and the timeline of these events are important.

1. 27 November 2012 – WiredTree Adds MariaDB for Faster MySQL Database Performance (well worth reading their motivations to switch)
2. 29 November 2012 – Monty Program & SkySQL release the MariaDB Client Library for C & Java
3. 4 December 2012 – MariaDB Foundation is announced, see ZDNet coverage.
4. mid-December 2012 – Wikimedia Foundation starts migrating …

RedeHost are one of Brazil's largest cloud computing and web hosting providers, with more than 60,000 customers and 52,000 web sites running on its infrastructure.

As the company grew, Redehost needed to automate operations, such as system monitoring, making the operations team more proactive in solving problems. Redehost also sought to improve server uptime, robustness, and availability, especially during backup windows, when performance would often dip.

To address the needs of the business, Redehost migrated from the community edition of MySQL to MySQL Enterprise Edition, which has delivered a host of benefits:

- Pro-active database management and monitoring using MySQL Enterprise Monitor, enabling …

If you're using MySQL replication, then you're probably counting on it for some fairly important need. Monitoring via something like Nagios is generally considered a best practice. This article assumes you've already got your Nagios server setup and your intention is to add a Ubuntu 10.04 NRPE client. This article also assumes the Ubuntu 10.04 NRPE client is your MySQL replication master, not the slave. The OS of the slave does not matter.

Getting the Nagios NRPE client setup on Ubuntu 10.04

At first it wasn't clear what packages would be appropriate packages to install. I was initially misled by the naming of the nrpe package, but I found the correct packages to be:

sudo apt-get install nagios-nrpe-server nagios-plugins

The NRPE configuration is stored in /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg, while the plugins are installed in /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/ (or lib64). The installation of this package …

I found Dennis the Menace, he now has a job as system administrator for a hosting company. Scenario: client has a problem with a server becoming unavailable (cause unknown) and has it restarted. MySQL had some page corruption in the InnoDB tablespace.

The hosting provider, being really helpful, goes in as root and first deletes ib_logfile* then ib* in /var/lib/mysql. He later says “I am sorry if I deleted it. I thought I deleted the log only. Sorry again.”  Now this may appear nice, but people who know what they’re doing with MySQL will realise that deleting the iblogfiles actually destroys data also. MySQL of course screams loudly that while it has FRM files it can’t find the tables. No kidding!

Then, while he’s been told to not touch anything any more, and I’m trying to see if I can recover the deleted files on ext3 filesystem (yes there are tools for that), he goes in again and puts an ibdata1 file back. No, …

My previous post focused on some of the problems of doing multi-tenant MySQL.

One of the reasons why I started hacking on Drizzle was that the multi-tenancy options for MySQL just weren’t very good (this is also the reason why I run my blog in a VM and not a shared hosting solution).

What you really want is to be able to give your users access to a virtual database server. What you don’t want is to be administering a separate database server for each of your users. What you want are CATALOGs.

A CATALOG is a collection of SCHEMAs (which have TABLEs in them). Each CATALOG is isolated from all the others. Once you connect to a catalog, that’s it. They are entirely separate units. There are no cross-catalog queries or CHANGE CATALOG commands. It is as if each catalog is its own database server.

How I lost 30 pounds in 2010 – a weight loss guide for developers Posted on December 30th, 2010 in blog, personal, zippykid.

2010 was a great year for me, I started a new company, and it’s been profitable since month 2, I closed my consulting company, and most importantly, I lost 30 pounds, and am more mobile/agile than I was in college. I’m 32 and I feel better than I did when I was 24. I’ve talked [...]

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If you have a wedding photography website, more than likely you want to showcase your work, or the work of your colleagues. You want to do this, without putting up low quality pictures, nor do you want to make your visitors wait 20 seconds before the page loads. Here are two plugins I use for my clients to help with this.

• The Smush.it plugin. This plugin compresses your image using the Smush.it API from Yahoo!, I’ve used it to reduce a page size from 3MB to 1.3MB, which meant that visitors were able to see the site faster, and appreciate the photographs rather than their internet connection.
• W3 Total Cache : This is a fairly advanced plugin that makes your site use MySQL less, and also helps you off load things onto a content delivery network with a few clicks. …