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Our bigger customers where we help to deploy Galera Cluster for MySQL set-ups have some commercial hardware (e.g. F5 or Cisco) for load balancing instead of software load balancers.

For those hardware load balancer it is not possible to see if a Galera node is available or not because the MySQL daemon is still running and responding on port 3306 but the service is not available nonetheless.
So the load balancer still serves the Galera node while he feeds for example a joiner node with a SST. This would lead to application errors which is unlovely.

One can try somehow to teach the load balancer to find out if a Galera Cluster node is really available or not. But this requires a more sophisticated load balancer, know-how how to teach the load balancer the new behaviour and possible interaction between the MySQL node and the load balancer. See our other discussion for this mater.

An other concept we hit on this week is that we could also block the port 3306 of the MySQL node with firewall rules (iptables). Then the hardware load balancer does not see anybody listening on port 3306 any more and assumes that this IP address should not be served any more.

We also learned this week that the REJECT rule is better than the DROP rule when we want to have fast response time for immediate elimination of traffic.

The script block_galera_node.sh has to be hooked as before into the wsrep_notify_cmd variable and an additional sudoers rule has to be added for the mysql user.

# # /etc/sudoers.d/mysql # chmod 0440 # mysql ALL = (root) NOPASSWD: /sbin/iptables

We are interested to hear your experience and your opinion about this approach.

Recently a forum question [ 1 ] got my attention:

Is there any performance issue with Union?

I used union all sometime back and it was performance issue just to make an opinion that we should used union in query.

The question itself was not too interesting because the answer is easy: It depends. But I wanted to see if there was an improvement in this common problem over time in MySQL.

Test set-up

So I prepared a little test to simulate some of the possible scenarios:

CREATE TABLE `u` ( `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `a` int(10) unsigned DEFAULT NULL, `b` int(10) unsigned DEFAULT NULL, `c` int(10) unsigned DEFAULT NULL, `d` int(10) unsigned DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `a` (`a`), KEY `b` (`b`), KEY `c` (`c`), KEY `d` (`d`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB ; INSERT INTO u SELECT NULL, ROUND(RAND()*10, 0), ROUND(RAND()*10, 0), ROUND(RAND()*1000000, 0), ROUND(RAND()*1000000, 0); INSERT INTO u SELECT NULL, ROUND(RAND()*10, 0), ROUND(RAND()*10, 0), ROUND(RAND()*1000000, 0), ROUND(RAND()*1000000, 0) FROM u; ... 1 mio rows ANALYZE TABLE u;

With this table we can simulate the OR problem with low and high selectivity.

Running the tests

We did the tests with MySQL (5.0 - 5.7), Percona Server (5.6) and MariaDB (5.5, 10.0) for the following queries:

EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM u WHERE a = 5 OR b = 5; EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM u WHERE a = 5 OR c = 500001; EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM u WHERE c = 500001 OR d = 500001;

We are interested in what the optimizer is doing and what the performance of the queries is. The following results came out:

Query 1 Query 2 Query 3 Database version rows avg. time QEP rows avg. time QEP rows avg. time QEP MySQL 5.0.92 194402 390 ms 1 104876 230 ms 2 6 < 10 ms 3 MySQL 5.1.66 194402 410 ms 1 104876 240 ms 2 6 < 10 ms 3 MySQL 5.5.24 194402 420 ms 1 104876 370 ms 1 6 < 10 ms 3 MariaDB 5.5.32 194402 460 ms 1 104876 420 ms 1 6 < 10 ms 3 MySQL 5.6.12 194402 440 ms 2 104876 240 ms 2 6 < 10 ms 3 Percona 5.6.12-60.40 194402 450 ms 2 104876 240 ms 2 6 < 10 ms 3 MySQL 5.7.1 194402 420 ms 2 104876 220 ms 2 6 < 10 ms 3 MariaDB 10.0.3 194402 450 ms 1 104876 400 ms 1 6 < 10 ms 3 Different Query Execution Plans (QEP)

• QEP 1: +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+---------+-------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+---------+-------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | u | ALL | a,b | NULL | NULL | NULL | 1049134 | Using where | +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+---------+-------------+
  
• QEP 2: +----+-------------+-------+-------------+---------------+------+---------+------+--------+-------------------------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+-------+-------------+---------------+------+---------+------+--------+-------------------------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | u | index_merge | a,c | a,c | 5,5 | NULL | nnnnnn | Using union(a,c); Using where | +----+-------------+-------+-------------+---------------+------+---------+------+--------+-------------------------------+
  
• QEP 3: +----+-------------+-------+-------------+---------------+------+---------+------+------+-------------------------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+-------+-------------+---------------+------+---------+------+------+-------------------------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | u | index_merge | c,d | c,d | 5,5 | NULL | n | Using union(c,d); Using where | +----+-------------+-------+-------------+---------------+------+---------+------+------+-------------------------------+
  
Conclusion
• Single query performance went down from 5 - 50% (in one case increased by 5%) over time (MySQL releases). But we can see some impacts on optimizer improvements.
• Newer MySQL releases are not necessarily faster for single-query performance than older ones. Most of the MySQL users are not running more than 1 or 2 concurrent queries. For them scalability improvements are not really an issue.
• There seems to be some changes in the Optimizer some for good, some for bad, depending on the release or branch/fork you are using. So test carefully when you change the release or branch/fork.
• And: Do not believe the whole marketing yelling but do your own testing...

Maybe you experienced some strange behaviour with MySQL: Everything is installed correctly and should work. But it does not.

Symptoms we have seen:

• MySQL starts/stops properly when started/stopped with service mysqld restart but MySQL does not start when a server is rebooted.
• Or after upgrading MySQL binaries mysqld will not start at all any more.
• Or after relocating MySQL datadir or changing default port MySQL does not start any more.

shell> service mysqld start MySQL Daemon failed to start. Starting mysqld: [FAILED] shell> grep mysqld /var/log/boot.log Starting mysqld: [FAILED]

If you are lucky you get some error message like: ERROR! The server quit without updating PID file (/data/mysql/server.pid). or:

130620 9:49:14 [ERROR] Can't start server : Bind on unix socket: Permission denied 130620 9:49:14 [ERROR] Do you already have another mysqld server running on socket: /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock ? 130620 9:49:14 [ERROR] Aborting

This typically happens when you relocate the MySQL data files (datadir), change port, socket, log file, pid file or similar.

The reason for this problem is not too easy to find. You see some traces in /var/log/boot.log. And if you know where to look for you will find something in /var/log/audit/audit.log. But without knowing where to look and what to look for it is quite hard.
If you are lucky the setroubleshoot utility is installed. This will report problems in the syslog (/var/log/messages).

The cause of this problem might be the Secure Linux (SELinux) feature!

SELinux [1], [2], [3] is typically used in Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora Linux. On Debian, Ubuntu and SuSE you have a similar solution called AppArmor.

To see if SELinux is enabled just run the following command:

shell> sestatus SELinux status: enabled SELinuxfs mount: /selinux Current mode: enforcing Mode from config file: enforcing Policy version: 24 Policy from config file: targeted

To disable SELinux you just have to run the following command:

shell> setenforce 0

And to make this change persistent you have to change it in the following configuration file:

# # /etc/selinux/config # # This file controls the state of SELinux on the system. # SELINUX= can take one of these three values: # enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced. # permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing. # disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded. SELINUX=permissive # SELINUXTYPE= can take one of these two values: # targeted - Targeted processes are protected, # mls - Multi Level Security protection. SELINUXTYPE=targeted

But possibly you want to move the MySQL datadir to an other location without disabling SELinux? To achieve this proceed with the following steps:

The simple way

If you have just moved datadir or the MySQL port the Blog article SELinux and MySQL of Jeremy Smyth is a good starting point.

Complicated way

If you want to create an other or a new MySQL instance or do some other stuff you have to do some more things manually (possibly there is also an automated way?):

First it is recommended to install the setroubleshoot utility. Then with the command:

shell> tail /var/log/messages Jun 20 09:38:53 ip-10-39-25-184 setroubleshoot: SELinux is preventing /bin/mkdir from write access on the directory /var/lib. For complete SELinux messages. run sealert -l ef8eae63-7ec3-4b22-87e0-5774120726c3

You will find what is going wrong. Follow the instructions:

shell> sealert -l ef8eae63-7ec3-4b22-87e0-5774120726c3 SELinux is preventing /bin/mkdir from write access on the directory /var/lib. ***** Plugin catchall_labels (83.8 confidence) suggests ******************** If you want to allow mkdir to have write access on the lib directory Then you need to change the label on /var/lib Do # semanage fcontext -a -t FILE_TYPE '/var/lib' where FILE_TYPE is one of the following: var_log_t, mysqld_var_run_t, mysqld_db_t, root_t. Then execute: restorecon -v '/var/lib' ***** Plugin catchall (17.1 confidence) suggests *************************** If you believe that mkdir should be allowed write access on the lib directory by default. Then you should report this as a bug. You can generate a local policy module to allow this access. Do allow this access for now by executing: # grep mkdir /var/log/audit/audit.log | audit2allow -M mypol # semodule -i mypol.pp

until MySQL starts properly. And also test a reboot of the machine!

Taxonomy upgrade extras: galeraclusterMySQL ClusterHigh Availability

Recently we had to set-up a 3-node Galera Cluster with a Load Balancer in front of it. Because Galera Cluster nodes (mysqld) still reply to TCP requests on port 3306 when they are expelled from the Cluster it is not sufficient to just leave it to the Load Balancer to check the port if a Galera node is properly running or not.

We used the wsrep_notify_cmd variable to hook our own script into the Galera Cluster which disables each Node on the Load Balancer when its state changed.

# my.cnf # [mysqld] wsrep_notify_cmd = /usr/local/bin/lvs_control.sh

The whole Galera Cluster Architecture looks as follows:

As Load Balancer we used the IPVS Load Balancer from the Linux Virtual Server (LVS) Project. This Load Balancer was made highly available with keepalived.

Our script to take a Galera Node out of the Load Balancer was the following:

#!/bin/bash -eu # # /etc/mysql/conf.d/wsrep.cnf # # [mysqld] # wsrep_notify_cmd = /usr/local/bin/lvs_control.sh # LOG="/tmp/lvs_control.log" LBIP="192.168.0.89" VIP="192.168.0.99" PORT="3306" LBUSER="galera" LBUSER="root" ETC="/etc/mysql/conf.d/wsrep.cnf" ETC="/home/mysql/data/mysql-5.5-wsrep-23.7-a/my.cnf" MYIP='' WEIGHT="100" DATE=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') echo $DATE >>$LOG regex='^.*=\s*([0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+).*' str=$(grep "^wsrep_node_incoming_address" $ETC 2>>$LOG) if [[ $str =~ $regex ]] ; then MYIP=${BASH_REMATCH[1]} else echo "Cannot find IP address in $str" >>$LOG exit 1 fi while [ $# -gt 0 ] ; do case $1 in --status) STATUS=$2 shift ;; --uuid) CLUSTER_UUID=$2 shift ;; --primary) PRIMARY=$2 shift ;; --index) INDEX=$2 shift ;; --members) MEMBERS=$2 shift ;; esac shift done # echo $* >> $LOG echo $STATUS >> $LOG # Undefined means node is shutting down # Synced means node is ready again if [ "$STATUS" != "Synced" ] ; then cmd="ssh $LBUSER@$LBIP 'sudo /sbin/ipvsadm -e -t $VIP:$PORT -r $MYIP -w 0'" else cmd="ssh $LBUSER@$LBIP 'sudo /sbin/ipvsadm -e -t $VIP:$PORT -r $MYIP -w $WEIGHT'" fi echo $cmd >>$LOG eval $cmd >>$LOG 2>&1 echo "ret=$?" >>$LOG exit 0

We assume that the same script can be used with little modifications for the Galera Load Balancer as well.

The new release of the MySQL Performance Monitor (mpm) is out!

New additions and improvements

• Easy to use templates
• Improved Security
• New Trigger Checks
• New Warnings Enabled
• Time Zone Shift Added
• New screens added
• Data transfer enabled

and much more (see below).

The MySQL Performance Monitor (mpm) for MySQL, Galera Cluster, Percona Server and MariaDB is a Monitoring Solution based on the Enterprise open source Monitor Zabbix.

It provides all the necessary modules to monitor MySQL performance metrics in detail and you can display them graphically.

New Features

Template improved for easier use - Security module added - Slave and MySQL templates fixed after feedback from customers - Innodb log information and pending I/O information added - Sort_buffer_size trigger added - Slave error skipped trigger added - Check for isolation level added - Binlog do and ignore filter warning enabled - Innodb deadlock trigger downgraded from warning to info - Time-shift feature implemented - Flush_time trigger added - MyISAM flush_time variable added - Read_buffer_size and max_allowed_package conflict implemented - Binlog_cache_size too small trigger back-ported from live - Read_buffer_size rule added - Max_allowed_packet and read_buffer_size added for rules - All 24 cores added to template items - Process memory graph with RAM size - Thread_stack_size too small alert implemented - Network packet graph reordered - Trigger for missing MaaS agent added - Server screens visually improved - Screens for Galera, network, CPU and server added - Transfer of data over HTTPS is possible now.

Download and Install

The most recent FromDual Performance Monitor for MySQL you can download from here... Or for more information you can reach us by e-mail at: contact@fromdual.com or by phone on +41 44 940 24 82.

Due to customer requests, we have added two of our advanced MySQL training courses in late April in Zurich, Switzerland. One course will be presented in German, the other in English.

The venue is the HSO in Zurich-Oerlikon.

The following dates has been set:

April 22 - 26Advanced MySQLHSO,​ ZurichApril 29 - Mai 3Advanced MySQLHSO,​ Zurich

Caution: the 2nd training contains May 1st (bank holiday). The training takes place regardless.

Remember to book now to reserve your place.

The MySQL SIG of DOAG invites you to join on February 27 at the Inside Hotel in Munich.
Topics of the SIG Event: MySQL Replication and new Features.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: trainingMySQL Clustermysql-training

The dates for the next MySQL Cluster (ndb) trainings with the Linux Hotel are scheduled now: March 11 - 12 2013 and September 23 - 24 2013.
You can book your training here.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: doagreplicationgaleramysql

On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 the next DOAG SIG MySQL meeting will take place in Hamburg (Germany) with the topic Replication.

Possible presentations are: MySQL Replication, Galera Cluster, Replication with Oracle GoldenGate, Replication with Zimory Scale and Tungsten Replicator.

The event will presumably be located at the Hotel Böttcherhof at Wöhlerstrasse 2.

FromDual is having a talk at Frankfurter Datenbanktage 2013, March 14/15

Taxonomy upgrade extras: High Availabilitymysqlconsultingclusterinnodbfromdualsupportgaleracodershipmysql-supportmysql-consulting

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. Customers can deploy Galera Cluster locally in LAN environments, as geo-clusters over the WAN or as virtual cluster in the cloud.

Galera Cluster for MySQL is offered as open source software. It can be downloaded freely from www.codership.com. Many of Codership customers are using Galera Cluster for business critical applications. FromDual will be offering consulting and support services for Galera users, especially in German speaking countries. FromDual has years of competence in MySQL consulting and support. They have a deep understanding of clustering and replication technologies and how to implement them into production. FromDual is the perfect partner for Codership said Seppo Jaakola, CEO of Codership.

With Galera we get a great high availability (HA) product for MySQL which removes all the pain we had with the existing MySQL HA solutions. Our customers are always looking for better ways to solve MySQL replication, scalability and management issues to secure 24/7 business availability and growth for the future business. Galera Cluster does exactly that. We are happy to add Galera Cluster to our consulting and support portfolio with the top level support from Codership says Oli Sennhauser, Senior MySQL consultant and CEO of FromDual.

Galera Cluster is used by users who need highly available MySQL database back-ends with very fast fail-over time for business critical applications like Social networks, Gaming platforms, Telecom/VoiP solutions, Media and entertainment sites, Business Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), ERP systems, web-shops, e-commerce solutions or similar critical applications.

About FromDual GmbH

FromDual is a global acting, neutral and vendor independent consulting, support and training company for MySQL, Percona Server, MariaDB and Galera Cluster with numerous customers all over the world in the Telecom, Media, Public Service, Internet and Industry sector. FromDual is Oracle Silver Partner and Open Database Alliance (ODBA) Silver Partner. In addition to its MySQL services FromDual distributes its Performance Monitor for MySQL for local installations or as Software as a Service solution. For more information about FromDual, their products, consulting and support services, please visit www.fromdual.com.

Press contact:

FromDual GmbH
Oli Sennhauser, CEO
E-Mail: oli.sennhauser@fromdual.com
Cell: +41 79 830 09 33

About Codership Oy

Codership develops fundamentally new replication and clustering solutions for open source databases, adopting novel ideas from latest DBMS and distributed computing research. The founders of Codership have long experience in developing several widely used MySQL clustering solutions before starting Galera development in 2007. Already thousands of users have chosen Galera Cluster solution – the Codership's flagship open source product and Codership is working actively for and with this growing user community. For more information about Codership, products, consulting and support services, please visit www.codership.com.

Press contact:

Codership OY
Seppo Jaakola, CEO
E-Mail: seppo.jaakola@codership.com
Cell: +358 405 105 938