Blog

A testimony to Linux resilience

A client released a new version of their website onto 20 AWS m1.medium instances (current site at peak load runs approximately 60 m1.medium webservers). It was clearly an unsuccessful release, but what was surprising was the system did not actually crash, it was effectively a meltdown, but servers were still operational with load averages > 100.

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Monitoring an online MySQL ALTER TABLE using Performance Schema

Recently a client asked me how long it would take for an ALTER TABLE to complete. Generally the answer is “it depends”. While this was running on a production system I tried with the Performance Schema in MySQL 5.

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The lack of good Internet access in the US

The state of high speed internet providers in the “Capital of the World” is rather woeful. Located in Queens, only a few miles from Manhattan leaves you few choices. Always plenty of ads, but options like Verizon FiOS are not available.

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MySQL shutdown via service reporting ERROR

Working with MySQL 5.6 under CentOS 6.4 I came across the following problem with MySQL reporting it did not shutdown successfully. $ sudo su - $ service mysql stop Shutting down MySQL.

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Updating MySQL using official repositories

The announcement of the MySQL Yum repositories was a long overdue request on my wish list. While it was possible to find MySQL at http://public-yum.oracle.com/ it was not the GA version MySQL 5.

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MySQL performance schema threads

A trap for those new to the MySQL Performance Schema is the expectation that thread_id in tables such as events_statements_current matches the id you find in the MySQL processlist. This is NOT TRUE.

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What causes LOST_EVENTS error in the MySQL binary log?

Using MySQL 5.6.13 under CentOS 6.4, I had a replication failure on one master/slave topology because the master binary log had the following entry that was intentionally written by the MySQL server.

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MySQL/NoSQL/Cloud Conference Latin America

Last week I was a guest speaker at the second annual MySQL/NoSQL/Cloud Conference held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Thanks to Santiago Lertora from Binlogic who has taken on the responsibility of organizing a event for the MySQL community in South America.

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An unexplained connection experience

The “Too many connections” problem is a common issue with applications using excessive permissions (and those that grant said global permissions). MySQL will always grant a user with SUPER privileges access to a DB to investigate the problem with a SHOW PROCESSLIST and where you can check the limits.

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A friday MongoDB funny

I had to laugh (just a bit) at this on the exhibitor floor at Oracle Open World 2013. There was a large MongoDB presence at the Slot 301 . There are a few reasons.

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Additional DB objects in AWS RDS

To expand on Jervin’s Default RDS Account Privileges , RDS for MySQL provides a number of routines and triggers defined the the ‘mysql’ meta schema. These help in various tasks because the SUPER privilege is not provided.

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MySQL MHA and Perl pathing

I am certainly not a knowledgeable Perl person, however I recently ran into the error Can’t locate MHA/MasterMonitor.pm on Red Hat 6.x. I have installed MySQL MHA on various systems before without any issues.

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Cloning MySQL 5.6 instances

A tip for all those cloud users that like cloning database servers (as reported in my book Effective MySQL – Replication Techniques in Depth ). Starting with MySQL 5.6, MySQL instances have a UUID .

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Unnecessary 3am (emergency) call

Help, the database is on fire. Well, it probably is but the solution may also be easy. Here are a few steps for the part-time MySQL DBA/sysadmin/developer. Total time to address this solution was 2 minutes, the inability to not go back to sleep, not priceless.

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