News

Its a known problem that changing the Storage Engine from MyISAM to InnoDB can cause some problems
[ 1
] if you have queries of this type:

SELECT COUNT(*) from table;

Luckily this query happens rarely and if, the query can be easily omitted or worked around by guesstimating the amount of rows in the table. For example with:

SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'test';

But in some rare cases customer really needs these values for some reasons. To not exhaust the resources of the server with this query which can be fired …

Also this year we will have a special track for MySQL, Galera, Percona und MariaDB at the FrOSCon in St. Augustin in Germany. The conference is scheduled for August 25 and 26 2012.

Together with the PostgreSQL people we are organizing a sub-conference for Open Source RDBMS there. Now we are looking for interesting talks about MySQL and related techniques like Galera, Percona, MariaDB. The only restriction for the talks is: They must be about an Open Source topic.

We encourage you to send your proposals. …

Table of Contents

• Building the Galera Load Balancer
• Starting the Galera Load Balancer
• Querying the Galera Load Balancer
• Draining nodes with Galera Load Balancer
• Removing nodes from and adding nodes to Galera Load Balancer

When you install a Galera Cluster for MySQL for High Availability (HA) it is not enough to install the Database Cluster to achieve this goal. You also have to make the application aware of this HA functionality. This is typically done with some kind of load balancing mechanism between …

On April 2^nd 2012 FromDual released the new version v0.9 of its Performance Monitor for MySQL (mpm). The new version can be downloaded from here.

The Performance Monitor for MySQL (mpm) is an agent which is hooked into Zabbix. Zabbix is an integrated Enterprise Monitoring solution which can produce performance graphs and alerting.

The changes in the new release are:

New functionality

• A new server module gathers MySQL database specific server informations. This is especially interesting for the Monitoring …

FreeBSD 9 seems to have some troubles with MySQL 5.5.20. A customer has moved from MySQL 5.0 on Linux to MySQL 5.5 on FreeBSD 9. He experienced a lot of periodic slow downs on the new, much stronger, system which he has not seen on the old Linux box.

This slow downs were also shown in high CPU system time but we could not see any I/O going on.

When we looked into MySQL we have seen many threads in Opening tables state in the MySQL processlist.

The first idea was to increase table_open_cache to 2048 and …

Because we are a bit short off disk space on one of our servers I had the idea to try out the MySQL feature Data Compression for InnoDB. This feature is useful if you have tables with VARCHAR, BLOB or TEXT attributes.

To not make it not too simple our table is partitioned as well. Our table looks like this:

CREATE TABLE `history_str` (
  `itemid` mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `clock` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `value` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  PRIMARY KEY …

Helsinki, Finland, Uster, Switzerland – February 18, 2012 – Codership, the provider of Galera Cluster for MySQL, and FromDual, a MySQL consulting company, today announced collaboration to offer Galera Cluster technology and related support and consulting services for Galera users all over the world, especially in German speaking countries Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH). Galera Cluster is a synchronous, true multi-master replication cluster for MySQL using the well known InnoDB storage engine. …

Many of you may monitor their databases for different purposes. Beside alerting it is often good to also make some graphs from MySQL performance counters to see what is actually happening on your database.

The following graphs where made with our FromDual Performance Monitor for MySQL as a Service (MaaS) set-up. If you do not have the time to install a performance monitoring yourself please feel free to contact us for our MaaS solution.

Overview

First of all it is a good idea to have an overview of all the …

In my set-ups I have different MySQL versions (MySQL 5.0, 5.1, 5.5 and 5.6, Percona Server 13.1 and 24.0, MariaDB 5.2.10, 5.3.3, Galera 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0) running in parallel at the same time.

Up to now I have not found a practical way yet to do this with RPM or DEB packages. If anybody knows how to do it I am happy to hear about it.

So I love and need only binary tar balls. Installation and removal is done within seconds and no remainings are left over after a removal. To operate the whole I use myenv.

Some …

On January 9^th FromDual launched its Monitoring as a Service (MaaS) solution for MySQL. This service is based on the Performance Monitor for MySQL (mpm) v0.8 and Zabbix.

The installation on customer side of the so called monitoring agent takes about 5 minutes (for installation, configuration and scheduling).

The collected performance data are sent to our service where you can view them with your web browser. Some examples you can find here.

You can download the Performance Monitor for MySQL from our …

Yesterday we released the new version of the MPM v0.8. The most important new features are:

• All modules are now available under GPL (including InnoDB and NDB module!).
• The MySQL Performance Monitor agent can now be use for Monitoring as a Service. We provide the Monitoring solution. You just have to install the agent.

Currently we are looking for people who want to test the new feature. If you are interested please get in contact with us.

Recently I found in a forum the following request for help:

My MySQL instance crashed because of free disk space fault. I saw in /var/lib/mysql all the files: ibdata1, ib_logfile* and all the folders containing frm files. Well, when i solved the problem and run successfully the instance, some databases disappeared. One of those is the most important, and i don’t know how many tables had and their structures. Is there any way for recover the entire lost database (structure and data) only having the …

A few days ago Codership announced their new version Galera v1.1 - synchronous Replication Cluster for MySQL. Before we look at the new feature of Rolling Online Schema Upgrade (OSU) we have a look at how to upgrade to the new Galera release.

A rolling upgrade of your synchronous Galera Replication Cluster from version 1.0 to 1.1 is quite easy when you stay at the same MySQL version (5.5).

To not lose the availability of your database service during the upgrade you should have at least 3 Galera nodes in …

On December 2^nd 2011 FromDual released the new version v0.7.2 of its Performance Monitor for MySQL. The new version can be downloaded from here.

The Performance Monitor for MySQL is an agent which is hooked into the agent of the well known Monitoring solution called Zabbix. Zabbix is an integrated Enterprise Monitoring solution which can produce performance graphs and alerting.

The changes in the new release are:

New functionality

• A new module for Galera was added (mainly Galera 0.8).
• A new module for the …

Introduction

Galera is a synchronous Multi-Master Replication for MySQL. It is therefore in competition with several other MySQL architectures:

• Master-Master Replication with MySQL
• MySQL Cluster
• The non-open source product called Schooner

Very often they can be easily replaced by Galera’s synchronous Multi-Master Replication for MySQL.

All those products have some advantages and disadvantages. Very often MySQL Master-Master Replication is used in the field because of its simplicity to set-up. But …

Introduction

Recently a customer claimed that his queries were slow some times and sometimes they were fast.

First idea: Flipping query execution plan caused by InnoDB could be skipped because it affected mainly MyISAM tables.

Second idea: Caching effects by either the file system cache caching MyISAM data or the MyISAM key buffer caching MyISAM indexes were examined: File system cache was huge and MyISAM key buffer was only used up to 25%.

I was a bit puzzled…

Then we checked the table_open_cache …

Introduction

MySQL/Galera synchronous Multi-Master Replication consists of 2 parts:

• The wsrep patches for MySQL (codership-mysql) and
• the Galera Replication Plugin (galera).

If you do not want to download the prepared binaries you can build it on you own.
First you have to download the native MySQL sources, then patch it with the Galera wsrep patches and compile it. In a second step you have to build the Galera Plugin.

This is especially useful because in the standard Galera binary tar balls the garbd …

Summary: In this article we have a short look at a simple MySQL example program written in Vala.

Recently a customer pointed me to a programming language called Vala. Vala is a C-style programming language generating C code which afterwards can be compiled and linked with the normal gcc.
This I found pretty useful to not mess around with pointers and all this stuff in C and to be capable anyway to write C programs for some projects I had in mind in my head since long.
Vala is mostly used around the Gnome …

Our Advanced MySQL Developer Workshop is over now and IMHO it was quite a success.
During the workshop it is planned to have some exercises. If you are curious and if you want to test or train your MySQL skills, find the exercises here: Advanced MySQL Developer Workshop Exercises.

The solutions are available on request as well.

If you like those exercises we could also provide the exercises of our Advanced MySQL DBA Workshop. Please let us know if you are interested in…

Have fun.