Shinguz's blog

Because the original MariaDB documentation is a little bit sparse about this topic here are some notes about how to do a streaming MariaDB backup:

# mariadb-backup --user=root --backup --parallel=4 --stream=mbstream | ssh root@target_machine "/usr/bin/mbstream -x -C /var/lib/mysql/"

# mariadb-backup --user=root --prepare --target-dir=/var/lib/mysql

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 2.2.5 of its popular Backup and Recovery Manager for MariaDB and MySQL (brman).

As already mentioned earlier, we roughly have a hand full of customers which are playing with the though of sharding solutions. They typically have many different customers (clients, tenants) and the number of customers becomes so huge (thousands to millions) that one machine cannot cope with the load any more.

In the last months we got more and more requests for supporting MariaDB/MySQL/Galera Cluster in (mostly Docker) containers.

Because of its additional layer and added complexity I do not like containers much. Containers are more complicated during troubleshooting and debugging problems.

Other people have already written more than enough about the advantages of containers. What is more difficult to find are the disadvantages of technologies. Thus I focus on those:

This week I came across an old known issue reported in May 2010: Master/Slave Replication with binlog_format = ROW and tables without a Primary Key is a bad idea! Especially if these tables are huge.

Why this is a bad idea is described in the bug report #53375:

We get ever and ever again customer requests concerning Deadlocks. First of all, Deadlocks are usually an application problem, not a database problem! The database itself manifests the application problem with the following message which is sent to the application as an error:

Also in 2022 there will be a FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting) on 5 and 6 February 2022. This time again online from Brussels (Belgium).

MariaDB has again its own Devroom and the Call for Papers (CfP) is now open for your submissions. We are looking for interesting topics about your daily business, technical presentations, war stories, point of views of management, etc. The deadline for the CfP is before 21 December 2021.

The MariaDB Connection ID exists since long ago. So why bother about the Connection ID? Because it is interesting and you can do some interesting things with the Connection ID like tracking statements in your connections and find where they come from your application code.

The MariaDB Connection ID is a strictly monotonic increasing number starting with 1 at server restart:

From 25 to 29 October 2021 (calendar week 43) we will have another MariaDB / MySQL advanced training in the Linuxhotel in Essen (Germany). The training is in German and will take place on-site (3G!). There are still some places free!

More details about the training you can find here.

Nearly everybody does backups. But nobody needs backups! What everybody wants and needs is a working restore not a working backup...

So how to make sure that your backup is working for the restore? There are a few things you can do already during your backup:

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 2.2.4 of its popular Backup and Recovery Manager for MariaDB and MySQL (brman).

Table of Contents

• What is SNMP?
• SNMP Agent (snmptrap)
• SNMP Manager (snmptrapd)
• Test the SNMP Agent
• Creating your own MIB
• Sending MariaDB SNMP traps from PHP
• Literature

What is SNMP?

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 2.0.3 of its popular MariaDB, Galera Cluster and MySQL multi-instance environment MyEnv.

The new MyEnv can be downloaded here. How to install MyEnv is described in the MyEnv Installation Guide.

Storage Engines like InnoDB, Aria and MyISAM are Row Stores. They store rows one after the other in blocks or even directly in a single file (MyISAM). On the other hand a Column Store like MariaDB ColumnStore stores all the same attributes (columns) of the rows together in chunks.

This is how the table sales_fact looks like:

Table of Contents

• Hardware requirements
• O/S (Linux) settings
• Installation
• Configuration
• Cross Engine Join User
• Start ColumnStore
• Create the Cross Engine Join User in the database

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 1.1.0 of its popular FromDual Ops Center focmm, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for MariaDB, MySQL and compatible databases.

The FromDual Ops Center for MariaDB and MySQL (focmm) helps DBA's and System Administrators to better manage their MariaDB, MySQL and compatible databases farms. Ops Center makes DBA and Admins life easier!

Today a customer gave me the idea of using a separate file as a volume for limiting the MySQL tmpdir size. On some not so well set-up Linux systems the MySQL tmpdir is located under /tmp which is the same mount point as / (root). This can lead to troubles in case the tmpdir is filled up with implicit temporary MyISAM tables which fills up the / (root) directory of the O/S as well.

Because they do NOT reflect your problems.

One of our customers upgraded last month from MariaDB 10.2 to MariaDB 10.5. In the same change he also converted all his data warehouse (DWH)/BI tables from MyISAM to Aria. An all this, naturally, without testing. And it miserably failed! And then we were under heavy time pressure to make things working again...

What has changed:

If we do customers database configuration analysis we check on one side if the most important MariaDB server system variables (innodb_buffer_pool_size, ...) are set appropriately but also if some MariaDB server system variables are configured completely wrong.

Fortunately MariaDB introduced in MariaDB 10.1 the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SYSTEM_VARIABLES view where you can find all the relevant information. But one!

Many customers come to us and ask us whether to use MariaDB or MySQL. The answer is not so simple. FromDual is a neutral and vendor independent MariaDB/MySQL consulting company. So we should not have (in the meaning of neutral) a clear preference. For us internally we have chosen our strategy according to some clearly defined criteria. But what we have chosen for us is not necessarily the right choice for you.

MariaDB has some time ago introduced or reused the sql_mode = 'oracle'. What they basically try to do is to implement a subset of the Oracle PL/SQL language. Because we receive more and more request from customers about MariaDB's Oracle PL/SQL it is worth investigating a bit more in this feature and summarize the state of the art of this topic in this article.

See also our former articles about the MariaDB sql_mode = 'oracle':

Sometimes customers want to have a very simple Galera Cluster set-up. They do not want to invest into machines and build up the know-how for load balancers in front of the Galera Cluster.

We see quite often customers complaining that their Galera Cluster is not stable and "crashes" from time to time. As always one has to investigate before rating.

What comes out quite often is that the customer (or better their developers) are running huge transactions.

For a fancy application we want to query a chunk of rows from a table and therefore we need the minimum and the maximum of the Primary Key of these rows.

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 2.2.3 of its popular Backup and Recovery Manager for MariaDB and MySQL (brman).