mysql

Hello everybody,

One month earlier than planned we have the great pleasure to announce you that the company called FromDual goes operational today!

We are excited about this step and it is an new era in our personal evolution to get back in full-contact with customers and solve their real life day-to-day MySQL problems.

So we are happy hearing from you and to help you solving your individual MySQL problems...

Problem

A customer recently showed up with the following problem:

With your guidelines [ 1 ] I am now able to send the MySQL error log to the syslog and in particular to an external log server.
But I cannot see which user connects to the database in the error log.

How can I achieve this?

Idea

During night when I slept my brain worked independently on this problem and in the morning he had prepared a possible solution for it.

Today a customer with corrupted data files showed up. When we enquired a bit more he told us that he had a broken I/O controller. This is one of the worst things which can happen to you!

The reason is the following: When a I/O controller starts to die it often does not happen immediately. The controller dies slowly producing more and more corrupt data. When you just write data without checking or reading them it can take days or even weeks until you discover the problem.

Recently we had a case where a customer got some corrupted blocks in his InnoDB tables. His largest tables where quite big, about 30 to 100 Gbyte. Why he got this corrupted blocks we did not find out yet (disk broken?).

When you have corrupted blocks in InnoDB, it is mandatory to get rid of them again. Otherwise your database can crash suddenly.

Or an active-active failover cluster à la VMware.

Today I have learned about a totally crazy/cool looking architecture where the expensive VMware ESX server was replace by a free/cheap VMware Workstation version in combination with DRBD.

Basically DRBD we name the poor man's SAN and that is exactly what this customer is doing. He replaced the SAN with DRBD and now he can easily move one VMware instance to the other host. Possibly it is not that flexible and powerful as an ESX Server but also not so expensive...

The architecture looks as follows:

According to different sources from the web the decision about the Oracle - Sun merger has been approved by the European commission soon. So at least in the West it is clear what is going on. Let us see what the East decides... [ 1 ], [ 2 ].

There are 2 different possible situations you can face when you have to deal with MySQL and syslog:

• MySQL is used as back-end for syslog to store the logging information. [ 6 ]
• MySQL itself should report to the syslog.

In this blog article we look at the second situation: How can you make MySQL reporting to the syslog.

iostat is a very handy tool to help you investigating what kind of performance problems you have. Especially your databases can cause a lot of troubles to your I/O system and thus it would be very nice if every DBA has installed iostat on all of his MySQL database servers.