The hashicorp/raft library is a Go library to provide consensus via Raft protocol implementation. It is the underlying library behind Hashicorp's Consul.

I've had the opportunity to work with this library a couple projects, namely freno and orchestrator. Here are a few observations on working with this library:

• TL;DR on Raft: a group communication protocol; multiple nodes communicate, elect a leader. A leader leads a consensus (any subgroup of more than half the nodes of the original group, or hopefully all of them). Nodes may leave and rejoin, and will remain consistent with consensus.
• The hashicorp/raft library is an implementation of …

My first encounter with the gdb command duel was on some old IRIX about 15 years ago. I immediately loved how convenient it was for displaying various data structures during MySQL debugging, and I wished Linux had something similar. Later I found out that Duel was not something IRIX specific, but a public domain patch […]

The post Duel: gdb vs. linked lists, trees, and hash tables appeared first on MariaDB.org.

Anyone who has peeked inside a gdb manual knows that gdb has some kind of Python API. And anyone who has skimmed through has seen something called “Pretty Printing” that supposedly tells gdb how to print complex data structures in a nice and readable way. Well, at least I have seen that, but I’ve never […]

The post Making life prettier with gdb PrettyPrinting API appeared first on MariaDB.org.

MySQL 3.20 to 4.0 In the good old days, when 32MB of RAM justified the name my-huge.cnf, when nobody knew Google and Facebook didn’t even exist, security was… how do I put it… kind of cute. Computer viruses didn’t steal millions and didn’t disrupt elections — they played Yankee Doodle or told you not to […]

The post Who are you? The history of MySQL and MariaDB authentication protocols from 1997 to 2017 appeared first on MariaDB.org.

In this blog we’ll look at the results from Percona’s blog poll on what programming languages you’re using for backend development.

Late last year we started a poll on what backend programming languages are being used by the open source community. The three components of the backend – server, application, and database – are what makes a website or application work. Below are the results of Percona’s poll on backend programming languages in use by the community:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

One of the best-known and earliest web service stacks is the LAMP stack, which spelled out refers to Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python. We can see that this early model is still popular when it comes to the backend.

Take Percona’s blog poll on what programming languages you’re using for backend development.

While customers and users focus and interact with applications and websites, these are really just the tip of the iceberg for the whole end-to-end system that allows applications to run. The backend is what makes a website or application work. The backend has three parts to it: server, application, and database. A backend operation can be a web application communicating with the server to make a change in a database stored on a server. Technologies like PHP, Ruby, Python, and others are the ones backend programmers use to make this communication work smoothly, allowing the customer to purchase his or her ticket with ease.

Backend programmers might not get a lot of credit, but they are the ones that design, …

The freshly released MySQL 8.0 includes a data dictionary, which makes MySQL much more reliable. Thanks to this features, we don't have any '.frm' files, and querying the information_schema is 30x to 100x faster than previous versions.

One drawback of the implementation is that the data dictionary tables are hidden by design.

While the reason is fully understandable (they don't want to commit on an interface that may change in the future) many curious users are disappointed, because openness is the basis of good understanding and feedback.

The problem to access the dictionary tables can be split in three parts:

• Finding the list of tables; …

I'm thoroughly happy to introduce gh-ost: triggerless, controllable, auditable, testable, trusted online schema change tool released today by GitHub.

gh-ost now powers our production schema migrations. We hit some serious limitations using pt-online-schema-change on our large volume, high traffic tables, to the effect of driving our database to a near grinding halt or even to the extent of causing outages. With gh-ost, we are now able to migrate our busiest tables at any time, peak hours and heavy workloads included, without causing impact to our service.

gh-ost supports testing in production. It goes a long …

As work on WarpSQL (Shard-Query 3) progresses, it has outgrown MySQL proxy.  MySQL proxy is a very useful tool, but it requires LUA scripting, and it is an external daemon that needs to be maintained.  The MySQL proxy module for Shard-Query works well, but to make WarpSQL into a real distributed transaction coordinator, moving the proxy logic inside of the server makes more sense.

The main benefit of MySQL proxy is that it allows a script to “inject” queries between the client and server, intercepting the results and possibly sending back new results to the client.  I would like similar functionality, but inside of the server.

For example, I would like to implement new SHOW commands, and these commands do not need to be implemented as actual MySQL SHOW commands under the covers.

For example, for this blog post I made a new example command called “SHOW PASSWORD”

This is not a comprehensive review, nor an user guide. It's a step-by-step account of my initial impressions while trying the new MySQL XProtocol and the document store capabilities. In fact, I am barely scratching the surface here: more articles will come as time allows.

MySQL 5.7 has been GA for several months, as it was released in October 2015. Among the many features and improvements, I was surprised to see the MySQL team emphasizing the JSON data type. While it is an interesting feature per se, I failed to see the reason why so many articles and conference talks were focused around this single feature. Everything became clear when, with the release of MySQL 5.7.12, the MySQL team announced a new release model.

Overview

In …