Sheeri Dot Org – Page 4 – Musings on topics including product management, tech, art.

Conference Tips!

For those going to Percona Live next week, I am re-sharing this blog post from September 2012 (from a now-defunct blog):

As many folks know, I do a bit of traveling, both going to conferences, and speaking at them (MySQL and others). So I have compiled a list of tips and tricks, from the basics like do not forget to eat breakfast to putting your business cards inside your bag. I have a list with pictures that I will add to as I think of more. I hope you enjoy this tumblr-style list of conference tips!

Do you have any other tips? Add them in the comments!

What does pt-show-grants look like?

[note: A broken link from a defunct blog made me dig up this post from archive.org and re-post it here; Beginners may find this informative!]

The OurSQL Podcast did an episode on some of the lesser-known but very useful tools in the Percona Toolkit. pt-show-grants is one of those tools that I use pretty frequently. While the manual page has an explanation of all the features and a few examples, you dont really see the output, and often you decide whether or not to use a tool based on what it gives you as output.

So here is a small example of an actual command I did today using pt-show-grants. I wanted to find the grants for a particular user. To do that without pt-show-grants, Id have to login to MySQL, run

mysql> SELECT host FROM mysql.user WHERE user='aus4_dev';

And then use that host information in a SHOW GRANTS statement:

mysql> SHOW GRANTS FOR aus4_dev@HOST;

But I would have to do this for each HOST if there were 2 hosts, Id have to run the SHOW GRANTS command twice.

Happily, pt-show-grants has an option called only, which will show you all user@host combinations for the username you specify. I have login information stored in a .my.cnf on this particular dev machine, and except for the password and host, this is an exact copy/paste of what I typed and the output:

[scabral@dev1.db ~]$ bin/pt-show-grants --only aus4_dev -- Grants dumped by pt-show-grants -- Dumped from server Localhost via UNIX socket, MySQL 5.1.52-log at 2012-03-01 08:52:01 -- Grants for 'aus4_dev'@'10.0.0.1' GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO 'aus4_dev'@'10.0.0.1' IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD '*1234567890ABCDEF1234567890ABCDEF12345678'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `aus4_dev`.* TO 'aus4_dev'@'10.0.0.2'; -- Grants for 'aus4_dev'@'10.0.0.2' GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO 'aus4_dev'@'10.0.0.2' IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD '*1234567890ABCDEF1234567890ABCDEF12345678'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `aus4_dev`.* TO 'aus4_dev'@'10.0.0.2';

By default, if I did not put in the only, it would show me all the users that I was allowed to see. There is also an ignore option, so if you want to show all users except a particular username, you can do that as well.

Being able to find all user@host users and their grants given a particular username is very handy and eliminates the need to go into the database to find the hostnames.

[original post date: 3/1/2012]

Testing Advanced Log Flushing for Percona Audit

We use Percona’s <A HREF=”https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.5/management/audit_log_plugin.html”>audit log plugin</A> to keep a record of all our logins. Recently we did one of those tasks that everyone knows they should do, but few ever do: change the application user’s password.

When we change the application password, we add a new application user with the proper permissions and a new password, update the information in our repository and wait a while. Using this procedure, any failures mean the old user is used, and more importantly – failure does not impact the end user.

We check the audit logs to see if there were failures – if the user is still being used – when it is no longer in use, we can drop the user.

For reference, here are our settings:

[mysqlaudit]# grep audit /etc/my.cnf
# Percona audit plugin options
audit_log_format = JSON
audit_log_rotate_on_size = 1073741824 . #1G
audit_log_rotations = 10
audit_log_file = /var/log/mysqlaudit/audit.log
audit_log_buffer_size = 4194304
audit_log_strategy = ASYNCHRONOUS
audit_log_policy = LOGINS

This means that we automatically flush logs >1G, keeping 10 audit logs. The other option is to do manual flushing, but we do not want our log files to get very large, and we don’t need to keep audit logs for a very long time.

The ideal behavio – we update our app to the new user, and then flush the logs. That way we could start a new audit log and only have to search the current audit log for the old user. I’m sure people are thinking, “well, it’s set to rotate by size, not manually, so you just cannot do it.” However, binary logs are set the same way and FLUSH LOGS do indeed rotate logs manually, even when auto rotate by size is set.

The tl;dr is that there is currently no way to do this without restarting MySQL. The audit_log_rotate_on_size variable is not dynamic, so we could not set it to manual without restarting MySQL. Here are some other tests we did to see if we could force an audit log flush while using the auto rotate:

We tried moving the audit logs and flushing:

[ ~]# cd /var/log/mysqlaudit/
[mysqlaudit]# ls -l
total 1459572
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 420839439 Mar 31 11:04 audit.log
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 1073749720 Mar 25 08:50 audit.log.01
[mysqlaudit]# mv audit.log.01 audit.log.02
[mysqlaudit]# mv audit.log audit.log.01
[mysqlaudit]# ls
audit.log.01 audit.log.02

Don’t worry, this doesn’t affect writing the file – the inode is still in MySQL and it still writes to the file, now called audit.log.01:
[mysqlaudit]# ls -l
total 1459652
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 420925253 Mar 31 11:07 audit.log.01
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 1073749720 Mar 25 08:50 audit.log.02
[mysqlaudit]# ls -l
total 1459652
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 420925253 Mar 31 11:07 audit.log.01
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 1073749720 Mar 25 08:50 audit.log.02
[mysqlaudit]# mysql -u sheeri.cabral -p -e “FLUSH LOGS;”
Enter password:
[mysqlaudit]# ls -l
total 1459688
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 420958983 Mar 31 11:07 audit.log.01
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 1073749720 Mar 25 08:50 audit.log.02

Note that this also proves that “FLUSH LOGS” does not close and open the audit log.

Can we force it? Let’s try by setting the audit_log_policy to NONE and then to LOGINS (what we have it as by default):

[mysqlaudit]# mysql -u sheeri.cabral -p -e “set global audit_log_policy=NONE; set global audit_log_policy=LOGINS”
Enter password:
[mysqlaudit]# ls -l
total 1459768
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 421043317 Mar 31 11:10 audit.log.01
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 1073749720 Mar 25 08:50 audit.log.02

Here’s another failed test – let’s see if we can disable then enable the plugin:
[mysqlaudit]# mysql -u sheeri.cabral -p -e “UNINSTALL PLUGIN audit_log”
Enter password:
[mysqlaudit]# ls -rlth
total 1.4G
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 1.1G Mar 25 08:50 audit.log.01
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 403M Mar 31 11:44 audit.log
[mysqlaudit]# mysql -u sheeri.cabral -p -e “INSTALL PLUGIN audit_log SONAME ‘audit_log.so’; ”
Enter password:
ERROR 1125 (HY000) at line 1: Function ‘audit_log’ already exists
[mysqlaudit]# mysql -u sheeri.cabral -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1375345
Server version: 5.5.51-38.1-log Percona Server (GPL), Release 38.1, Revision b4a63b4

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the current input statement.

[(none)]> INSTALL PLUGIN audit_log SONAME ‘audit_log.so’;
ERROR 1125 (HY000): Function ‘audit_log’ already exists

So, I ended up needing to restart MySQL if I wanted to re-enable the plugin.

Sometimes the failures are the most illuminating!

[I realize that the plugin probably could not hack FLUSH LOGS but it would be great to get FLUSH AUDIT or something similar…]

MySQL DevOps First Step: Revision Control

MySQL environments are notorious for being understaffed – MySQL is everywhere, and an organization is lucky if they have one full-time DBA, as opposed to a developer or sysadmin/SRE responsible for it.

That being said, MySQL is a complex program and it’s useful to have a record of configuration changes made. Not just for compliance and auditing, but sometimes – even if you’re the only person who works on the system – you want to know “when was that variable changed?” In the past, I’ve relied on the timestamp on the file when I was the lone DBA, but that is a terrible idea.

I am going to talk about configuration changes in this post, mostly because change control for configuration (usually /etc/my.cnf) is sorely lacking in many organizations. Having a record of data changes falls under backups and binary logging, and having a record of schema changes is something many organizations integrate with their ORM, so they are out of scope for this blog post.

Back to configuration – it is also helpful for disaster recovery purposes to have a record of what the configuration was. You can restore your backup, but unless you set your configuration properly, there will be problems (for example, an incompatible innodb_log_file_size will cause MySQL not to start).

So, how do you do this? Especially if you have no time?

While configuration management systems like chef, puppet and cfengine are awesome, they take setup time. If you have them, they are gold – use them! If you do not have them, you can still do a little bit at a time and improve incrementally.

If you really are at the basics, get your configurations into a repository system. Whether you use rcs, cvs, subversion or git (or anything else), make a repository and check in your configuration. The configuration management systems give you bells and whistles like being able to make templates and deploying to machines.

It is up to you what your deployment process is – to start, something like “check in the change, then copy the file to production” might be good enough, for a start – remember, we’re taking small steps here. It’s not a great system, but it’s certainly better than not having any revision control at all!

A great system will use some kind of automated deployment, as well as monitoring to make sure that your running configuration is the same as your configuration file (using <A HREF=”https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/3.0/pt-config-diff.html”>pt-config-diff). That way, there are no surprises if MySQL restarts.

But having a great system is a blog post for another time.

Generating a MySQL Password

One of the services our database engineers provide is adding users to MySQL. We have some nice Chef recipes, so all I have to do is update a few files, including adding in the MySQL password hash.

Now, when I added myself, I just logged into MySQL and generated a password hash. But when my SRE (systems reliability engineer) colleague needed to generate a password, he did not have a MySQL system he could login to.

The good news is it’s easy to generate a MySQL password hash. The MySQL password hash is simply a SHA1 hash of a SHA1 hash, with * at the beginning. Which means you do not need a MySQL database to create a MySQL password hash – all you need is a programming language that has a SHA1 function (well, and a concatenate function).

And I found it, of course, on this post at StackExchange (http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/234592/217471). So you don’t have to click through, here is what it says – and I have tested all these methods and I get the same password hash. I have changed their example of “right” to “PASSWORD HERE” so it’s more readable and obvious where the password goes, in case you copy and paste from here.

Some one-liners:

**MySQL** (may require you add -u(user) -p):

mysql -NBe "select password('PASSWORD HERE')"

**Python**:

python -c 'from hashlib import sha1; print "*" + sha1(sha1("PASSWORD HERE").digest()).hexdigest().upper()'

**Perl**:

perl -MDigest::SHA1=sha1_hex -MDigest::SHA1=sha1 -le ‘print “*”. uc sha1_hex(sha1(“PASSWORD HERE”))’

**PHP**:

php -r 'echo "*" . strtoupper(sha1(sha1("PASSWORD HERE", TRUE))). "\n";'

Hopefully these help you – they enabled my colleagues to easily generate what’s needed without having to find (or create) a MySQL instance that they can already login to.

Upgrading from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.5

In my last post, a tale of two MySQL upgrades, a few folks asked if I would outline the process we used to upgrade, and what kind of downtime we had. Well, the processes were different for each upgrade, so … Continue reading

In my last post, a tale of two MySQL upgrades, a few folks asked if I would outline the process we used to upgrade, and what kind of downtime we had.

Well, the processes were different for each upgrade, so I will tackle them in separate blog posts. The first step was to upgrade all our MySQL 5.1 machines to MariaDB 5.5. As mentioned in the previous post, MariaDBs superior performance for subqueries is why we switched and we switched back to MySQL for 5.6 to take full advantage of the performance_schema.

It is not difficult to blog about our procedure, as we have documentation on each process. My first tip would be to do that in your own environment. This also enables other folks to help, even if they are sysadmins and not normally DBAs. You may notice the steps contain items that might be obvious to someone who has done maintenance before we try to write them detailed enough that if you were doing it at 3 am and a bit sleep-deprived, you could follow the checklist and not miss anything. This also helps junior and aspiring DBAs not miss any steps as well.

The major difference between MySQL 5.1 and MySQL 5.5 (and its forks, like MariaDB) is that FLOAT columns are handled differently. On MySQL 5.1, a float value could be in scientific notation (e.g. 9.58084e-05) and in 5.5, its not (e.g. 0.0000958084). This makes checksumming difficult, as all FLOAT values will show differences even when they are the same number. There is a workaround for this, devised by Shlomi Noach.

We have an n+1 architecture for databases at Mozilla this means that we have an extra server. If we need 1 master and 3 slaves, then n+1 is 1 master and 4 slaves. Because of this, there are 2 different ways we upgrade the first slave we upgrade, and subsequent slaves/masters.

These steps are copied and pasted from our notes, with minor changes (for example, item #2 is send out maintenance notices but in our document we have the e-mail addresses to send to).

Assumptions: Throughout these notes we use /var/lib/mysql, as that is our standard place for MySQL. You may need to change this to suit your environment. We are also using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for our operating system, so this procedure is tailored to it (e.g. yum install/yum remove). We control packages using the freely available puppet mysql module we created.

For the first slave
The overall procedure is to perform a logical backup the database, create a new empty installation of the new server version, and import the backup. Replication does work from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.5 and back (at least, on the 25 or so clusters we have, replication worked in both directions. Your mileage may vary).

1. Make sure the slave has the same data as the master with checksums (the previous checksum is fine, they should be running every 12 hours).

2. Send out maintenance notices.

3. Take the machine out of any load balanced services, if appropriate

4. Set appropriate downtimes in Nagios

5. Start a screen session on the server

6. Do a SHOW PROCESSLIST to see if there are any slaves of the machine. If so, move them to another master if they are needed. [we have a different checklist for this]

7. Do a SHOW SLAVE STATUS to see if this machine is a slave.
a. If this machine is a slave, ensure that its master will not delete its binlogs while the upgrade is occurring.

b. If this machine is a slave, do a SLAVE STOP; and copy the master.info file somewhere safe [or the slave_master_info table if using that]

8. Stop access to the machine from anyone other than root (assuming you are connecting from root):

UPDATE mysql.user SET password=REVERSE(password) WHERE user!='root'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

9. See what the default character set is for the server and databases:
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set_server'; SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set_database'; SELECT SCHEMA_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA WHERE DEFAULT_CHARACTER_SET_NAME!='utf8' AND SCHEMA_NAME NOT IN ('mysql');
If applicable, change the server defaults to UTF8 and change databases to utf8 with ALTER DATABASE dbname DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;

10. Stop access to the machine from anyone other than root (assuming you are connecting from root): UPDATE mysql.user SET password=REVERSE(password) WHERE user!='root'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

11. Check to see how big the data is:
mysql> SELECT SUM(DATA_LENGTH)/1024/1024/1024 AS sizeGb FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA!='information_schema';

12. Determine how you can export the data, given the size. You may be able to export without compression, or you may need to do a mysqldump | gzip -c > file.sql, then compress the old data files instead of just moving them aside.

13. Do a du -sh * of the datadir and save for later, if you want to compare the size of the database to see how much space is returned after defragmenting

14 .Export the data from all databases, preserving character set, routines and triggers. Record the time for documentations sake. Im assuming the character set from step 9 is utf8 (if its something like latin1, youll need to put in default-character-set=latin1 in the command). If the machine has slaves, make sure to use master-data=1. If you need to compress, change the shell command accordingly:
time mysqldump --all-databases --routines --triggers --events > `date +%Y-%m-%d`_backup.sql

15. Stop MySQL

16. Copy the config file (usually /etc/my.cnf) to a safe place (like /etc/my.cnf.51)

17. Do a rpm -qa | egrep -i "percona|mysql". Do a yum remove for the mysql/percona packages. Its OK if it also removes related packages, like perl-DBD, but make a note of them, because you will want to reinstall them later. Sample:
yum remove Percona-Server-client Percona-Server-shared-compat Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-devel Percona-Server-server

18. Move the /var/lib/mysql directory to /var/lib/mysql-old. Compress any files that need compression (if you need to compress, to decompress the sql file). If you absolutely cannot keep the files, see if you can copy them somewhere. We really want to preserve the old data directory just in case we need to revert.

19. Decompress the sql file, if applicable.

20. Install the proper packages by changing puppet to use maridb55 instead of mysql51 or percona51. Verify with rpm -qa | egrep -i percona|mysql|maria

[this may be different in your environment; we use the freely available puppet mysql module we created.

21. Run mysql_install_db

22. Make any changes to /etc/my.cnf (e.g. run puppet). When going from MySQL 5.1 to 5.5, there are no particular global changes Mozilla made.

– when we went from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1, we did a global change to reflect the new slow query log options.

23. chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql/

24. chmod 775 /var/lib/mysql

25. Start MySQL and check the error logs for any warnings. Get rid of any warnings/errors, and make sure MySQL is running.

26. Turn off binary logging. Import the export, timing how long it takes, for reference:

time mysql < YYYY_MM_DD_backup.sql

27. Restart MySQL and look for errors, you may need to run mysql_upgrade.

28. Turn on binary logging, if applicable.

29. Test.

30. If this machine was a slave, re-slave it. Let it catch up, making sure there are no data integrity errors, and no replication errors.

31. Reinstate permissions on the users:
UPDATE mysql.user SET password=REVERSE(password) WHERE user!='root'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

32. Re-slave any slaves of this machine, if needed.

33. Turn back on Nagios, making sure all the checks are green first.

34. Run a checksum on the master to propagate to this slave, and double-check data integrity on the slave. Note that you will want to use –ignore-columns with the output of this command in the checksum, to avoid false positives from scientific notation change (see http://www.sheeri.com/mysql-5-1-vs-mysql-5-5-floats-doubles-and-scientific-notation/)

Find FLOAT/DOUBLE fields to ignore in checksum: SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT COLUMN_NAME) FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE DATA_TYPE IN ('float','double') AND TABLE_SCHEMA NOT IN ('mysql','information_schema','performance_schema');

35. Put the machine back into the load balancer, if applicable.

36. Inform folks the upgrade is over

On the first upgrade, we did what is usually recommended – do a logical export with mysqldump, and then an import. With other upgrades in the same replication hierarchy, we can take advantage of Xtrabackup to stream the new version directly to the machine to be upgraded.

The general procedure here is similar to the above, except that a logical export is not taken. After preparation steps are taken, a new empty MariaDB 5.5 server is installed. Then we use xtrabackup to backup and restore the existing MariaDB 5.5 server to the machine we are upgrading.

For subsequent slaves, and the master

Coordinate with affected parties ahead of time
Send out any notices for downtime
Take the machine out of any load balanced services, if appropriate. If the machine is a master, this means failing over the master first, so that this machine becomes a regular slave. [we have a different checklist for how to failover]
Set appropriate downtimes in Nagios, including for any slaves
Start a screen session on the server
Do a SHOW PROCESSLIST to see if there are any slaves of the machine. If so, move them to another master if they are needed.
Do a SHOW SLAVE STATUS to see if this machine is a slave.
1. If this machine is a slave, ensure that the master will not delete its binlogs while the upgrade is occurring.
2. If this machine is a slave, do a SLAVE STOP; and copy the master.info file somewhere safe
3. If this machine is a slave, do a SLAVE STOP; and copy the master.info file somewhere safe
Save a list of grants from pt-show-grants, just in case there are users/permissions that need to be preserved. [this is done because sometimes masters and slaves have different users, though we try to keep everything consistent]
Figure out how big the backup will be by doing a du -sh on the datadir of the already-upgraded machine to be backed up, and make sure the new machine has enough space to keep the old version and have the new version as well.
Stop MySQL on the machine to be upgraded.
Copy the config file (usually /etc/my.cnf) to a safe place (like /etc/my.cnf.51)
Do a rpm -qa | egrep -i "mysql|percona". Do a yum remove for the mysql packages (at least mysql-server, mysql). Its OK if it also removes related packages, like perl-DBD, but make a note of them, because you will want to reinstall them later.
Move the /var/lib/mysql directory to /var/lib/mysql-old. Compress any files that need compression. If you absolutely cannot keep the files, see if you can copy them somewhere. We really want to preserve the old data directory just in case we need to revert.
Install the proper packages by changing puppet to use maridb55 instead of mysql51 or percona51, running puppet manually. Verify with rpm -qa | egrep -i "percona|mysql|maria"
Run mysql_install_db
Make any changes to /etc/my.cnf (or run puppet). When going from MySQL 5.1 to 5.5, there are no particular changes.
chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql/
chmod 775 /var/lib/mysql
Start MySQL and check the error logs for any warnings. Get rid of any warnings/errors, and make sure MySQL is started.
Stop MySQL, and move or delete the datadir that was created on upgrade.
If you are directly streaming the backup to the machine to be upgraded, do this on the machine to be upgraded:
cd $DATADIR nc -l 9999 | tar xfi -
On the machine to be backed up (that is already upgraded), in a screen session, making sure you get any slave info:
time innobackupex --slave-info --stream=tar $DATADIR | nc (IP/hostname) 9999
Once xtrabackup is complete, fix permissions on the datadir:
chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql/ chmod 775 /var/lib/mysql
Prepare the backup:
time innobackupex --apply-logs --target-dir=/var/lib/mysql
Fix permissions on the datadir again:
chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql/ chmod 775 /var/lib/mysql
Restart MySQL and look for errors
Test.
If this machine was a slave, re-slave it. Let it catch up, making sure there are no data integrity errors, and no replication errors.
Re-slave any slaves of this machine, if needed.
Turn back on Nagios, making sure all checks are green first.
Put the machine back into the load balancer, if applicable.
Inform folks the upgrade is over

Its long and detailed, but not particularly difficult.

A Tale of Two MySQL Upgrades

At the beginning of 2013, Mozilla’s MySQL databases were a mix of MySQL 5.0, Percona’s patched MySQL 5.1, Percona’s patched MySQL 5.5 and MariaDB 5.5. MySQL 5.1 was released in November 2008 – so at the beginning of the year, … Continue reading

At the beginning of 2013, Mozillas MySQL databases were a mix of MySQL 5.0, Perconas patched MySQL 5.1, Perconas patched MySQL 5.5 and MariaDB 5.5. MySQL 5.1 was released in November 2008 so at the beginning of the year, we still had databases with no new major features in 4 years. Currently we have almost all our databases at Oracle’s MySQL 5.6 — the only stragglers are our cluster running TokuDB and a few machines that are no longer in use. Heres a graph showing the state of our machines you can see that in the first half of the year we concentrated on upgrading our 5.0 and 5.1 servers to 5.5, and then in the second half of the year we upgraded everything to MySQL 5.6 (click on the image to get the .png file):

After running some tests, we determined that MariaDB 5.5 was the best option for us and our particular workload. For most of our servers, it did not matter whether we use Percona, MariaDB or Oracles MySQL, but our Bugzilla servers really benefited from MariaDBs better subquery optimization, so we went with that. We had set up some Percona 5.5 servers over the spring/summer of 2012, when we moved some of our infrastructure to a new data center.

We upgraded to MySQL 5.5 to be on a recent version of MySQL. In the middle of the year, we had a choice should we stay where we were, or should we upgrade? We had no particular directive from developers to upgrade for the new MySQL 5.6 features. However, we have been doing more and more digging into our systems, and we really wanted the performance_schema features so we could dig even more. We want to be able to parse queries in real-time, perhaps with Anemometer without having to take an offline log file and run pt-query-digest on it.

So, we chose to upgrade to MySQL 5.6. Unfortunately, there were no other GA products to test against by mid-2013, neither MariaDB nor Percona had a GA 5.6 product, so our bake-off was functional only, not performance-related. Oracles MySQL 5.6 passed with flying colors, and so we proceeded to upgrade.

Now, we have a recent and consistent version of MySQL installed, that we can work with to gain insights into our systems. A pretty great goal to have been met for 2013!

MySQL Workbench “Clean up SQL” Feature

I was playing around with MySQL Workbench earlier in the week, and ran across the “clean up SQL” feature, which I thought was neat. Here’s a picture-based demonstration – you can click on the pictures to make them bigger, so … Continue reading

Learn MySQL for Free with MySQL Marinate, Season 3!

The 3rd season of MySQL Marinate begins October 1st, 2013*. Join the meetup group and RSVP at season 3 to join! You can do the work on MySQL, or if you prefer, MariaDB or Percona. If you do not have … Continue reading

The 3rd season of MySQL Marinate begins October 1st! Join the meetup group and RSVP at season 3 to join! You can do the work on MySQL, or if you prefer, MariaDB or Percona.

If you do not have the book yet, you can still do the first week by using the online material from Browse Contents on the OReilly book page for Learning MySQL. There is homework for week 1, see the master list for all the information.

If you would like to learn MySQL from the ground up, consider joining us. This is for beginners If you have no experience with MySQL, or if you are a developer that wants to learn how to administer MySQL, or an administrator that wants to learn how to query MySQL, this course is what you want.

If you are not a beginner, you are welcome to join too maybe you need a refresher, or maybe you just want to test your knowledge or earn badges. Thats OK too!

The format of a virtual self-study group is as follows:

Each participant acquires the same textbook (Learning MySQL, the butterfly OReilly book, published 2007). You can acquire the textbook however you want (e.g. from the libary or from a friend) but if you buy the book, we ask that you buy it from our Amazon Store, to help pay for meetup fees.

Each participant commits to read one chapter per week, complete the exercises and post a link to the completed work. Tweet using the hashtag #mysqlmarinate.

Each participant obtains assistance by posting questions to a discussion area set up on the Virtual Tech Self Study Message Board for each chapter.

Each participant receives a badge upon finishing each chapter and all assignments.

Note: There is no classroom or video instruction.

How do I get started?

Become a member of the Virtual Tech Self Study Meetup Group.

Acquire the book (the only item that may cost money). Get your hands Learning MySQL see if your local library has it, if someone is selling their copy, or buy it from our Amazon Store (this helps pay for meetup fees).

When your book arrives, start your virtual learning by reading one chapter per week. Complete the exercises; if you have any questions, comments or want to learn more in-depth, thats what the forums are for!

Learning MySQL

FAQs:

Q: How long will the course last?

A: We will cover 12 lessons (chapters) in the book, so 12 (twelve) weeks starting October 1st, though we will have one week that is a break so that you can catch up if you need to or you have a week off if you need it. Refer to the MySQL Marinate Season 3 Master Discussion List for specific dates.

By January 1st, 2014, you will know MySQL!!

Q: Can I get ahead?

A: Sure! This is go-at-your-own-pace. To prevent spoilers, please put comments in the appropriate chapter threads.

Q: Does this cover the Percona patch set or MariaDB forks?

A: This covers the basics of MySQL, which are immediately transferable to Perconas patched MySQL or MariaDB builds.

Q: What do I need in order to start the course?

A: All you need is the book and access to a computer, preferably one that you have control over. Installing MySQL is chapter 2, so really, all you need is the book and a computer to start, you dont have to worry about any prerequisites. If you do not have the book yet, you can still do the first week by using the online material from Browse Contents at the OReilly Learning MySQL page.

Q: Where can I put completed assignments?

A: You will be able to put completed assignments on github. Instructions are in week 1.

Q: The book was published in 2007. Isnt that a bit old?

A: Yes! OReilly is working on new material, but it is not ready yet. The basics are still accurate, and we will let you know what in the book is outdated. We will also have optional supplemental/extra credit material for those who want to learn more right away. We are confident that this self-study course will make you ready to dive into other, more advanced material.

Soak it in!

*either tomorrow or today, depending on when and where you read this. Or it was in the past, if you have to catch up on your blog posts. Its OK, you can join us late, too. You can go at your own pace.

Code of Conduct: It’s a Misnomer

For me, a Code of Conduct is not actually guidelines for how to act. For me, a Code of Conduct is what to do if there is a problem with someones conduct. When I get on a plane, I am told what to do in case of emergency here are the exits, heres how to use your life jacket and oxygen mask. I am not told every little thing that could be an emergency I believe that would be a waste of time and invariably something would be left out.

Similarly, for conferences, listing out all the behaviors that might be problematic is a waste of time, and invariably, behaviors are left out. In my opinion, that is a waste of time. What is NOT a waste of time is giving out the information of what to do in case of emergency.

At the MySQL Connect website, under the Plan tab, is a link to the Oracle Events Code of Conduct. It says, simply, to act professionally and respectfully, and if there are any problems, contact Oracle Security and gives a phone numbers. I like that. Simple, and effective. And it was put under the Plan tab exactly where it should be. Its something to note as you plan to attend.

I put that number in my phone and, thankfully, did not have to use it. But knowing that I had a plan in case something happened made all the difference to me.

*BIG DISCLAIMER I do not speak for all people everywhere on this matter, just myself.