News

Today we had to investigate in a very strange behaviour of IST and SST on a MariaDB Galera Cluster.

The symptom was, that some Galera Cluster nodes took a very long time to start. Up to 7 minutes. So the customer was concluding that the Galera Cluster node does an SST instead of an IST and was asking why the SST happens.

It have to be mentioned here, that the MariaDB error log is very confusing about whether it is an SST or an IST. So the customer was confused and concluded, that MariaDB Galera Cluster was …

The Docker version of the distributions are often quite old. On Ubuntu 16.04 for example:

shell> docker --version 
Docker version 1.13.1, build 092cba3

But the current docker version is 17.09.0-ce (2017-09-26). It seems like they have switched from the old version schema x.y.z to the new year.month.version version schema in February/March 2017.

Install Docker CE Repository

Add the Docker’s official PGP key:

shell> curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
OK …

Important: FromDual does NOT recommend to use an automated VIP failover technology as described below for a MariaDB/MySQL Master/Master Replication. In such a topology we recommend a manual VIP failover with prepared scripts!

Some of our customers still want to have old-style MariaDB Master/Master Replication Clusters. Time goes by, new technologies appear but some old stuff still remains.

The main problem in a Master/Master Replication set-up is to make the service highly available for the application …

There are some pretty sophisticated Load Balancers for Galera Clusters setups out in the market (ProxySQL, MaxScale, HAproxy, …). They have many different exotic features. You can nearly do everything with them. But this comes at the cost of complexity. Non of them is simple any more.

A widely underestimated Load Balancer solution for Galera Cluster setups is the Galera Load Balancer from Codership. It is an simple Load Balancer solution which serves all of our daily needs when it comes to Galera …

There are 2 different ways to solve this task.

The first way is by enabling the variable log_queries_not_using_indexes (MariaDB/MySQL). This can be done eigther online:

sql> SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES LIKE 'log_quer%';
+-------------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name                 | Value |
+-------------------------------+-------+
| log_queries_not_using_indexes | OFF   |
+-------------------------------+-------+

sql> SET GLOBAL log_queries_not_using_indexes = ON;

or offline in the my.cnf …

The query is so evil/slow because it does a Full Index Scan (FIS). Other call this operation also a Index Fast Full Scan (IFFS). This is much too much work for the result wanted (the value of the AUTO_INCREMENT column).

This can be shown with the Query Execution Plan you get with the EXPLAIN command:

sql> EXPLAIN SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() FROM test;
+------+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+---------+-------------+
| id   | select_type | table | type  | possible_keys …

Recently I switched on the MariaDB slow query logging flag log_queries_not_using_indexes just for curiosity on one of our customers systems:

mariadb> SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES LIKE 'log_quer%';
+-------------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name                 | Value |
+-------------------------------+-------+
| log_queries_not_using_indexes | OFF   |
+-------------------------------+-------+

mariadb> SET GLOBAL log_queries_not_using_indexes = ON;

A tail -f on the MariaDB Slow Query Log caused a …

We have sometimes discussions with our customers whether to store LOBs (Large Objects) in the database or not. To not rephrase the arguments again and again I have summarized them in the following lines.

The following items are more or less valid for all large data types (BLOB, TEXT and theoretically also for JSON and GIS columns) stored in a MySQL or MariaDB (or any other relational) database.

The idea of a relational table based data-store is to store structured data (numbers, data and short character …

Preparing the MySQL Enterprise Administrator Training I found that the MySQL Enterprise Backup Incremental Backup is not described very well. Thus I tried it out and wrote down this how-to:

Differential Incremental Backup

Full Backup

mysqlbackup --user=root --backup-dir=/tape/full backup-and-apply-log
grep end_lsn /tape/full/meta/backup_variables.txt
end_lsn=2583666

Incremental Backups

mysqlbackup --user=root --incremental-backup-dir=/tape/inc1 --start-lsn=2583666 --incremental backup
grep end_lsn …

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 1.2.5 of the popular Backup and Recovery Manager for MySQL and MariaDB (fromdual_brman).

You can download the FromDual Backup and Recovery Manager from here.

In the inconceivable case that you find a bug in the FromDual Backup and Recovery Manager please report it to our Bugtracker or just send us an [email](mailto:contact@fromdual.com?Subject=Bug report for fromdual_brman).

Any feedback, statements and testimonials are welcome as well! …

Most (relational) DBAs and DB application developers know the concept of a primary key (“PK”) and what it is good for. However, much too often one still encounters table definitions without a PK. True, the relational theory based on sets does not need a PK, and all operations (insert, select, update, delete) can also be done on tables for which no PK was defined. If performance doesn’t matter (or the data volume is small, a typical situation in tests), the lack of a PK does not immediately …

Your log file does not show any reason:

6644:2017-03-08 23:13:02.115 - INFO: FromDual Performance Monitor for MySQL and MariaDB (fpmmm) (1.0.1) run started. 6644:2017-03-08 23:13:02.809 - DBG : /usr/bin/zabbix_sender –zabbix-server

It took only 700 ms in the output. So this cannot be a reason for a timeout of 30 seconds.

I will check with your configuration file.

Regards, Shinguz

Hello hranitel

Thanks for your comments.

to 1) it will be fixed in next release in fact it is already fixed in rev763.

to 2) If the fpmmm/Zabbix agent in total takes more than 30 seconds something (with your network?) is wrong. Enable the LogLevel to 4 and check where the time has gone. We had something already earlier with network issues.

to variables_order: Your suggestion is considered and will be introduced into the next version.

to key FromDual.server.check: Something similar I have seen last week. Is …

Hello Vadim

Thank you for your suggestion. I am pretty sure that the empty line is not the problem. But I admit that it is a bug and it will be fixed in the next release (in fact it is already fixed in our internal revision 763). But it is IMHO not critical and will not affect your work.

# ./fpmmm-1.0.1/bin/fpmmm --version

1.0.1

# ./fpmmm-rev763/bin/fpmmm --version
rev763

# ./fpmmm-1.0.1/bin/fpmmm --config=/etc/fpmmm.conf 

1
# ./fpmmm-rev763/bin/fpmmm --config=/etc/fpmmm.conf 
1

What …

The PAM authentication plugin is an extension included in MySQL Enterprise Edition (since 5.5) and in MariaDB (since 5.2).

• Pluggable authentication module
• Understanding PAM

MySQL authentication against pam_unix

• The PAM Authentication Plugin

Check if plugin is available:

# ll lib/plugin/auth*so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mysql mysql 42937 Sep 18  2015 lib/plugin/authentication_pam.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mysql mysql 25643 Sep 18  2015 lib/plugin/auth.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mysql mysql 12388 Sep 18  2015 lib/plugin/auth_socket.so …

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 1.0.1 of its popular Database Performance Monitor for MySQL, MariaDB, Galera Cluster and Percona Server fpmmm.

You can download fpmmm from here.

In the inconceivable case that you find a bug in the fpmmm please report it to our Bug-tracker.

Any feedback, statements and testimonials are welcome as well! Please send them to feedback@fromdual.com.

This release contains various bug fixes.

Changes in fpmmm v1.0.1

fpmmm agent

• Fpmmm suppresses …

When we do Galera Cluster consulting we always discuss with the customer if his software is Galera Cluster ready. This basically means: Can the software cope with the Galera Cluster specifics?

If it is a software product developed outside of the company we recommend to ask the software vendor if the software supports Galera Cluster or not.

We typically see 3 different answers:

• We do not know. Then they are at least honest.
• Yes we do support Galera Cluster. Then they hopefully know what they are talking …

From time to time we see in customer engagements that MySQL Master/Slave replication is set-up doing schema or table level replication filtering. This can be done either on Master or on Slave. If filtering is done on the Master (by the binlog_{do|ignore}_db settings), the binary log becomes incomplete and cannot be used for a proper Point-in-Time-Recovery. Therefore FromDual recommends AGAINST this approach.

The replication filtering rules vary depending on the binary log format (ROW and

STATEMENT) See …

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 1.2.4 of the popular Backup and Recovery Manager for MySQL and MariaDB (fromdual_brman).

You can download the FromDual Backup and Recovery Manager from here.

In the inconceivable case that you find a bug in the Backup and Recovery Manager please report it to our Bugtracker or just send us an [email](mailto:contact@fromdual.com?Subject=Bug report for fromdual_brman).

Any feedback, statements and testimonials are welcome as well! Please send …

This one is for all MySQL-DBA’s, which are working on macOS. Since the Apple OS has a rather peculiar way of starting and stopping MySQL, compared to Linux, you can run into some issues. These problems occur especially, if you have no access to the GUI.

Preparation

Put skip-grant-tables into the mysqld section of the my.cnf. A my.cnf can be found in /usr/local/mysql/support-files. You MUST work as root for all the following steps.

shell> sudo -s
shell> vi …