On Thursday, Dr Charles Bell and I will be presenting a webinar on MySQL Utilities; there will be a heavy focus on what you can acheive with them and how you should use them. As well as listening to the presentation, this is a great chance to get your questions answered by the experts (Israel Gomez from the engineering team will also be on-line to help with the questions). As always, the webinar is free but you should register in advance here. If the time isn’t convenient, register anyway and you’ll be sent a link to the replay when it’s available.
Abstract:
MySQL Utilities provide a collection of command-line utilities that are used for maintaining and administering MySQL databases, including:
General Utilities (Disk Usage, Redundant Indexes, Search Meta Data)
Andrew Morgan and Chuck Bell will guide you through these utilities, and many more, explaining what you can gain from these tools and how to use them (for example how a single command repeatedly checks your master server and in the event it fails, automatically promotes one of the slaves to be the new master). This is your opportunity to listen to the development lead describe what he and his team have created, and to get your questions answered by the experts.
WHO:
Andrew Morgan, Principal Product Manager
Chuck Bell, Software Development Manager
WHEN:
Thu, Jul 18: 09:00 Pacific time (America)
Thu, Jul 18: 10:00 Mountain time (America)
Thu, Jul 18: 11:00 Central time (America)
Thu, Jul 18: 12:00 Eastern time (America)
Thu, Jul 18: 16:00 UTC
Thu, Jul 18: 17:00 Western European time
Thu, Jul 18: 18:00 Central European time
Thu, Jul 18: 19:00 Eastern European time
Thu, Jul 18: 21:30 India, Sri Lanka
Fri, Jul 19: 00:00 Singapore/Malaysia/Philippines time
Fri, Jul 19: 00:00 China time
Fri, Jul 19: 01:00 日本
Fri, Jul 19: 02:00 NSW, ACT, Victoria, Tasmania (Australia)
The presentation will be approximately 60 minutes long followed by Q&A.
In the webinar replay you can learn how MySQL Cluster 7.3 has delivered key features enabling the latest generation of web and mobile services to take advantage of high scalability on commodity hardware, SQL and NoSQL interfaces and 99.999% availability; these include:
Support for Foreign Key constraints – implemented to be as compatibile with InnoDB as possible
NoSQL JavaScript connector allowing native access from node.js applications to MySQL Cluster, bypassing the SQL layer
Browser-based Auto-Installer for fast configuration of production-grade clusters
Connection Thread Scalability for enhancing performance of each connection to the cluster by up to 8x
MySQL Server 5.6 support for improved performance and replication robustness
If you missed the live webinar then you missed your chance to ask your own questions (though feel free to post them as comments on this post) but here are some of the highlights from the Q&A:
How do the NoSQL APIs get the data – are there any relational joins behind the scenes to query the DB? It depends on the API – for example, Memcached and Node.js APIs act on a single table but others do allow joins – this is something that’s enabled by the NDB API (a C++ client library that encapsulates the ‘wire’ protocol to access the Data Nodes in order to read or write data).
I have an existing Joomdle based application. Would it work if I converted the tables to MySQL Cluster? If I understand correctly, you’re wondering whether an existing application that’s coded to work with InnoDB would now work with MySQL Cluster. We hope that we’ve got as close to that as possible but there’s always the possibility that some tweaks to the app or middleware will need to be made. I can’t comment specifically on Joomdle.
Is it possible to use the JavaScript API directly from the client (e.g. browser) directly rather than from server code running in Node.js? Not at present but would love to hear feedback on whether this is a common requirement and what the use cases would be.
The MySQL Connect conference is a great opportunity to listen to and chat with people from the MySQL community – including the engineers who work on or around MySQL as well people who are using it in production. The conference takes place from 21-23 September in San Francisco (runs up to Oracle OpenWorld). There are 84 sessions scheduled and the content catalog has now been published.
What’s New in MySQL Cluster 7.3 [CON2477]. In this session, discover the latest developments and how MySQL Cluster 7.3 enables developers to focus on building robust, scalable applications faster. Get your database up and running in minutes by using the browser-based autoinstaller, combining autodiscovery with best practices to deliver the ideal configuration the first time. Migrate existing applications and frameworks to MySQL Cluster, and simplify new ones by exploiting cross-shard foreign keys. Access your data directly with the native driver for JavaScript/Node.js. At the same time, enjoy the benefits of 99.999 percent uptime and a distributed, autosharded database that scales to deliver higher loads than ever whether with SQL or NoSQL APIs—even when you’re working with queries and updates that span shards.
Deploy and Scale MySQL Cluster Like a Pro Without Opening the Manual [CON3763]. This session aims to tackle a few myths head-on: “Installing a distributed database has to be complex,” “Only NoSQL data stores make life easy for developers,” “Years of painful experience and a PhD are needed to configure a distributed, real-time database.” In this session, see for yourself how to configure and deploy MySQL Cluster over several hosts in just minutes—right from your browser. Observe how the MySQL Cluster Installer applies best practices to produce a tailored configuration, using your hints about your application together with autodiscovery of the system resources. Also see how MySQL Cluster Manager simplifies the management of your cluster, performing sophisticated operations such as adding new nodes or performing online upgrades with ease.
MySQL Cluster 7.3 has just been declared Generally Available (and with it the new MySQL Cluster Auto-Installer) – download it from here.
Deploying a well configured cluster has just got a lot easier! Oracle have released a new auto-installer/configurator for MySQL Cluster that makes the processes extremely simple while making sure that the cluster is well configured for your application. A single command launches the web-based wizard which then steps you through configuring the cluster; to keep things even simpler, it will automatically detect the resources on your target machines and use these results together with the type of workload you specify in order to determine values for the key configuration parameters.
Before going through the detailed steps, here’s a demonstration of the auto-installer in action (note that this is actually an earlier version but the idea is the same)…
Downloading and running the wizard
The software can be downloaded as part of the MySQL Cluster package from the MySQL Cluster Download page. To run on Windows, just double click setup.bat – note that if you installed from the MSI and didn’t change the install directory then this will be located somewhere like C:Program Files (x86)MySQLMySQL Cluster 7.3. On Linux, just run ndb_setup from the bin folder.
If you launch the installer from a desktop environment then the first page of the wizard will automatically be opened in your web browser, if not then just browse to the URL that is displayed on the command line.
Creating your cluster
Figure 1 Specify hosts and application type
After the initial splash-screen you’re presented with the page shown in Figure 1 where you specify the list of servers that will form part of the cluster.
You also get to specify what “type” of cluster you want; if you’re experimenting for the first time then it’s probably safest to stick with “Simple testing” but for a production system you’d want to specify the application type and query profile, i.e. write-intensive.
Figure 2 Auto-discovery of host resources
On the next page (Figure 2), you will see the wizard attempt to auto-detect the resources on your target machines. If this fails (e.g. if you don’t have an accessible SSH server on the target hosts) then you can enter the data manually. You can also overwrite the resource-values – for example, if you don’t want the cluster to use up a big share of the memory on the target systems then just overwrite the amount of memory.
It’s also on this page that you can specify where the MySQL Cluster software is stored on each of the hosts (if the defaults aren’t correct) – this should be the path to where you extracted the MySQL Cluster tar-ball file – as well as where the data (and configuration files) should be stored. You can just overwrite the values or select multiple rows and hit the “edit” button.
Figure 3 Review Cluster topology
The following page (Figure 3) presents you with a default set of nodes (processes) and how they’ll be distributed across all of the target hosts – if you’re happy with the proposal then just advance to the next page.
Alternatively, you can add extra nodes, move nodes from one host to another (just drag and drop), delete nodes or change a node from one type to another.
Figure 4 Review configuration parameters
On the next screen (Figure 4) you’re presented with some of the key configuration parameters that have been configured (behind the scenes, the installer sets many more) that you might want to override; if you’re happy then just progress to the next screen. If you do want to make any changes then make them here before continuing. Note that you can enable the advanced configuration option here in order to view/modify more parameters.
Figure 5 Deploy the Cluster
With the click of a button, the final screen (Figure 5) lets you deploy (copy the correct configuration settings to the hosts and create the directory structures) and start the Cluster.
If you prefer or need to start the processes manually, this page also shows you the commands that you’d need to run (as well as the configuration files if you need to create them manually).
A traffic light display shows the various Cluster nodes (processes) coming into service.
Figure 6: Confirm that all nodes are running
Finally, you can confirm that all of the processes (nodes) are up and running (note that any API slots that don’t have MySQL Servers using them won’t show as running – that’s as expected):
As always it would be great to hear some feedback especially if you’ve ideas on improving it or if you hit any problems.
This Wednesday (27th March) Mat Keep and I will be presenting a free, live webinar on MySQL 5.6 Replication. You need to register here ahead of the webinar – worth doing even if you can’t attend as you’ll then be sent a link to the replay when it’s available. We’ll also have some of the key MySQL replication developers on-line to answer your questions and so it’s also a great chance to get some free consultancy 😉
Details….
Join this session to learn how the new replication features in MySQL 5.6 enable developers and DBAs to build and scale next generation services using the world’s most popular open source database. MySQL 5.6 delivers new replication capabilities which we will discuss and demonstrate in the webinar:
High performance with Binary Log Group Commit, Multi-Threaded Slaves and Optimized Row Based Replication
High availability with Global Transaction Identifiers, Failover Utilities and Crash Safe Slaves & Binlog
Data integrity with Replication Event Checksums
Dev/Ops agility with new Replication Utilities, Time Delayed Replication and more
The session will wrap up with resources to get started with MySQL 5.6.
WHEN:
Wed, Mar 27: 07:00 Pacific time (America)
Wed, Mar 27: 08:00 Mountain time (America)
Wed, Mar 27: 09:00 Central time (America)
Wed, Mar 27: 10:00 Eastern time (America)
Wed, Mar 27: 14:00 UTC
Wed, Mar 27: 14:00 Western European time
Wed, Mar 27: 15:00 Central European time
Wed, Mar 27: 16:00 Eastern European time
Wed, Mar 27: 19:30 India, Sri Lanka
Wed, Mar 27: 22:00 Singapore/Malaysia/Philippines time
Wed, Mar 27: 22:00 China time
Wed, Mar 27: 23:00 日本
Thu, Mar 28: 01:00 NSW, ACT, Victoria, Tasmania (Australia)
The presentation will be approximately 60 minutes long.
MySQL 5.6 has now been declared Generally Available (i.e. suitable for production use). This is a very exciting release from a MySQL replication perspective with some big new features. These include:
Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) – a unique identifier that is used accross your replication topology to identify a transaction. Makes setting up and managing your cluster (including the promotion of a new master) far simpler and more reliable.
Multi-threaded slaves (MTS) – Increases the performance of replication on the slave; different threads will handle applying events to different databases.
Binary Log Group Commit – Improves replication performance on the master.
Optimized Row Based Replication – reduces the amount of data that needs to be replicated; reducing network usage and potentially speeding up replication.
Crash-Safe Replication – makes replication transactional. The data and replication positioning information are both updated as part of the same transaction.
Replication Event Checksums – checks to ensure that the data being replicated hasn’t become corrupted, avoids writing corrupted data to the slave.
Time-Delayed Replication – configure one or more of your slaves to only apply replicated events after a configured time. This can be useful to protect against DBA mistakes.
Informational Logs – includes the original statement in the binary log when using row-based-replication to aid in debugging.
If you’re already familiar with using MySQL Replication, here are a few pointers on what to do differently for the new MySQL 5.6 features but you should refer to the full tutorial to see these changes in context.
First of all, here are some extra configuration parameters to include…
When initiating (or restarting) replication on the slave, it is no longer necessary to include the binary log positioning information as the master and slave will automatically negotiate what outstanding events need to be replicated based on any GTIDs previously received by the slave…
slave> CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST='black',
MASTER_USER='repl_user',
MASTER_PASSWORD='billy',
MASTER_AUTO_POSITION=1;
Please try out these new features and let us know what you think.
The Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software.
I attended for the first time over the weekend and was really impressed by the number of people there, the energy and the quality of the content. The event really lives up to it’s name and is very developer-focused.
In the end, I got the opportunity to make 2 presentations. The first is a general introduction to MySQL Cluster….
The second illustrates how you can realise the benefits promised by NoSQL data stores wihtout losing the consistency and flexibility of relational databases…
On Thursday, Dr Charles Bell and I will be presenting a webinar on MySQL Utilities; there will be a heavy focus on what you can acheive with them and how you should use them. As well as listening to the presentation, this is a great chance to get your questions answered by the experts (Israel Gomez from the engineering team will also be on-line to help with the questions). As always, the webinar is free but you should register in advance here. If the time isn’t convenient, register anyway and you’ll be sent a link to the replay when it’s available.
