Galera Cluster

In MariaDB master/slave replication there is a feature called attribute promotion/demotion.

Simply put, it is about how the slave behaves or should behave if the master and slave have different column definitions or even a different number of columns or a different sequence of columns.

Use case of the customer

This week we discussed with a customer the case of how he could perform a rolling schema upgrade (RSU) in a Galera cluster.

With previous schema changes he has always had problems, which has led to a …

Recently I had the opportunity to have a lot of Linux systems (VMs with Rocky Linux 9) from one of our regular Galera Cluster trainings all to myself for a week. And MariaDB 11.4.4 with Galera Cluster was already installed on the machines.

Since I had long wanted to try out how a Galera Cluster behaves with an increasing number of nodes, now was the opportunity to try it out.

The following questions were to be answered:

• How does the throughput of a Galera cluster behave depending on the number of Galera …

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.

For this type of customers there is a possibility to just run a VIP controlled by Corosync/Pacemaker in front of the Galera Cluster moving an IP address from one node to the other. But this is just an active/passive/passive set-up and reads and writes are only possible to one node at the time.
So you loose the scaling …

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.

In general transactional database do NOT like huge transactions because of various reasons (MVCC, ROLLBACK, UNDO, Locking etc.). They can do it. But they are not quite good in doing it and they do not like it. Instead you should …

Source: Github: codership / documentation

Codership Blog for Galera Cluster with release announcements.

Galera Plugin version 4 Series

Galera plug-in 26.4.21 Release Notes, Release Date: 12 December 2024

Galera plug-in 26.4.20 Release Notes, Release Date: 2 August 2024

Galera plug-in 26.4.19 Release Notes, Release Date: 1 July 2024

Galera plug-in 26.4.18 Release Notes, Release Date: 26 March 2024

Galera plug-in 26.4.17 Release Notes, Release Date: 8 January 2024

Galera plug-in 26.4.16 Release Notes, Release …

Because upgrading from MariaDB 10.4 to MariaDB 10.5 (non-clustered) seems not to be a problem
[ 1
] we take the challenge and try to create a receipt based on the MariaDB 10.3 to MariaDB 10.4 Galera Cluster upgrade documentation
[ 3
]:

Before you start

Before you begin with the upgrade you should consider a few things:

• Downgrade is officially not supported!
  [ 4
  ] It might work, or not.
• So you should have taken a proper an clean backup before you start with the upgrade and you should be sure the restore …

Table of Contents

• General findings
• Migration from MySQL 5.x to MariaDB 5.5
• Migration from MySQL 5.0 to MariaDB 10.3
• Migration from MariaDB 10.0 to Percona Server 5.6
• Migration from MySQL/Percona 5.6 to MariaDB 10.0
• Migration from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.2
• Migration from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.3
• Migration from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.4
• Migration from Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5 to MariaDB Galera Cluster 10.4
• Migration from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.5
• Migration from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.6
• Migration from …

A while ago somebody on Google Groups asked for the Uptime of a Galera Cluster. The answer is easy… Wait, no! Not so easy… The uptime of a Galera Node is easy (or not?). But Uptime of the whole Galera Cluster?

My answer then was: “Grep the error log.” My answer now is still: “Grep the error log.” But slightly different:

$ grep 'view(view_id' *
2019-03-07 16:10:26 [Note] WSREP: view(view_id(PRIM,0e0a2851,1) memb {
2019-03-07 16:14:37 [Note] WSREP: …

Today we had to investigate in a very strange behaviour of IST and SST on a MariaDB Galera Cluster.

The symptom was, that some Galera Cluster nodes took a very long time to start. Up to 7 minutes. So the customer was concluding that the Galera Cluster node does an SST instead of an IST and was asking why the SST happens.

It have to be mentioned here, that the MariaDB error log is very confusing about whether it is an SST or an IST. So the customer was confused and concluded, that MariaDB Galera Cluster was …

There are some pretty sophisticated Load Balancers for Galera Clusters setups out in the market (ProxySQL, MaxScale, HAproxy, …). They have many different exotic features. You can nearly do everything with them. But this comes at the cost of complexity. Non of them is simple any more.

A widely underestimated Load Balancer solution for Galera Cluster setups is the Galera Load Balancer from Codership. It is an simple Load Balancer solution which serves all of our daily needs when it comes to Galera …

When we do Galera Cluster consulting we always discuss with the customer if his software is Galera Cluster ready. This basically means: Can the software cope with the Galera Cluster specifics?

If it is a software product developed outside of the company we recommend to ask the software vendor if the software supports Galera Cluster or not.

We typically see 3 different answers:

• We do not know. Then they are at least honest.
• Yes we do support Galera Cluster. Then they hopefully know what they are talking …

Somebody recently asked, what they had to do, if they wanted to move their InnoDB-Logfiles back to the datadir. As a challenge, the servers were part of a Galera Cluster.

My first thought was:

The problem is not the Galera Cluster itself, it is the rsync-SST (wsrep_sst_method = rsync) that could cause trouble and destroy your InnoDB-Logfiles, by simply overwriting or deleting them.

So I tried to confirm my thought and realised, I was wrong. This works anyway, because the node just takes the dataset from the …

One of our customers recently ran into a problem, where he wanted to have a preferred donor for SST, whenever a node came up. The problem was, that the node did not come up, when the preferred donor was not running.

In the documentation, you can find the parameter wsrep_sst_donor, which prefers the specified node as SST donor. This is great, as long as the donor is actually running.

The problem can be fixed by adding a comma to the end of the value of wsrep_sst_donor, what would look like this: …

To synchronize the data between the Galera Cluster and a new or re-entering Galera node Galera Cluster uses 2 different mechanisms:

• For full synchronization of data: Snapshot State Transfer (SST).
• For delta synchronization of data: Incremental State Transfer (IST).

The Incremental State Transfer (IST) is relevant when a node is already known to the Galera Cluster and just left the cluster short time ago. This typically happens in a maintenance window during a rolling cluster restart.

The Galera Cache is a …

FromDual has the pleasure to announce the release of the new version 1.0.1 of the FromDual Nagios and Icinga plugins for MySQL, Galera Cluster and MariaDB.

Download

The new FromDual Nagios plugins can be downloaded here.

In the inconceivable case that you find a bug in the FromDual Nagios plugins please report it to our bug tracker.

Any feedback, statements and testimonials are welcome as well! Please send them to [feedback@fromdual.com](mailto:feedback@fromdual.com?Subject=Feedback for Nagios plugins). …

FromDual offers different MySQL, Galera Cluster and MariaDB training modules. For training dates see our MySQL and MariaDB training class schedule.

SQL for Beginners (3 days)

This training is made for all who want to learn the basics of the SQL language. Future DBAs, database developers and data analysts.

MySQL and MariaDB for Beginners (2 days)

This MySQL and MariaDB training is made for those who want to learn the basics of the MySQL database system. Future MySQL DBAs and MySQL database developers.

MySQL …

FromDual is pleased to announce the release of a new version 1.0.0 of the Nagios and Icinga plugins for MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server and Galera Cluster.

Any information about the changes and the new functions of the Nagios and Icinga plugins you can find here.

If you have any problems with the new version you can reach us by e-mail at: contact@fromdual.com or by phone on +41 44 500 58 20.

Your FromDual Team

After properly installing and testing a Galera Cluster we see that the set-up is not finished yet. It needs something in front of the Galera Cluster that balances the load over all nodes.
So we install a load balancer in front of the Galera Cluster. Typically nowadays HAProxy is chosen for this purpose. But then we find, that the whole Galera Cluster is still not high available in case the load balancer fails or dies. So we need a second load balancer for high availability.
But how should we properly …

I wanted to install MySQL Galera Cluster 5.6 on the new Ubuntu 14.04 with provided packages. It was a bit tricky to make it work.

apt-get update
apt-get install mysql-server   # this is still 5.5
# from universe
apt-get install mysql-server-5.6 mysql-client-5.6 mysql-client-core-5.6

So far so good. Everything works fine as MySQL 5.6.

Now we have to download Galera 5.6 from Coderships website:

wget https://launchpad.net/galera/3.x/25.3.5/+download/galera-25.3.5-amd64.deb
wget …