Presenting Cluster tutorial at MySQL UC (and discount code!)

Together with Geert and Andrew I’ll be teaching the MySQL Cluster tutrial at this year’s MySQL Cluster User Conference – Santa Clara, on April 12th. If you’re interested in using MySQL Cluster but aren’t sure how to get started (or you’ve used it but would like some tips) then this is a great opportunity. Check out the tutorial description.

If you register by 15 March then you get the early-bird price and if you use this ‘friend of a speaker’ code then you get an additional 25% off: mys10fsp

MySQL Cluster 6.3.31b source released

The source version for MySQL Cluster 6.3.31b has now been made available at ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/cluster_telco/mysql-5.1.41-ndb-6.3.31b/

This replaces MySQL Cluster 6.3.30 and 6.3.31.

You can either wait for the binaries to be released or if you’re in a rush then you can find instructions on building the binaries for yourself in the earlier article: “MySQL Cluster 7.0.7 source released“.

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 6.3.31b (compared to 6.3.30) can be found in the MySQL Cluster 6.3.31b Change Log

MySQL Cluster 7.0.11b source released

The source version for MySQL Cluster 7.0.11b has now been made available at ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/cluster_telco/mysql-5.1.41-ndb-7.0.11b/

This replaces MySQL Cluster 7.0.10 and 7.0.11.

You can either wait for the binaries to be released or if you’re in a rush then you can find instructions on building the binaries for yourself in the earlier article: “MySQL Cluster 7.0.7 source released“.

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.0.11b (compared to 7.0.10) can be found in the MySQL Cluster 7.0.11b Change Log

MySQL Cluster Connector for Java – replay available for part 1 of the webinar

The replay of the two webinars can now be accesed from mysql.com

Remember that the second part of the webinar will be on March 3rd (details below).

ClusterJ Architecture

MySQL have been working on a new way of accessing MySQL Cluster using Java. Designed for Java developers, the MySQL Cluster Connector for Java implements an easy-to-use and high performance native Java interface and OpenJPA plug-in that maps Java classes to tables stored in the high availability, real-time MySQL Cluster database.

There is a series of 2 webinars coming up, as always these are free to attend – you just need to register in advance:

Part 1: Tuesday, February 16, 2010: 10:00 Pacific time

• an overview of the MySQL Cluster Connector for Java
• what these technologies bring to Java developers
• implementation details of the MySQL Cluster Java API and Plug-In for OpenJPA
• configuring the connection to MySQL Cluster
• creating the Java Domain Object Model for your tables
• managing insert, update, and delete operations
• querying the database
• how to get started developing new Java applications using these interfaces

Accessfrom mysql.com

Part 2: Wednesday, March 03, 2010: 10:00 Pacific time

• how MySQL Cluster Connector for Java coexists with existing OpenJPA / TopLink / JDBC-based apps
• how to evaluate the MySQL Cluster Connector for Java alternatives
• performance comparisons with both existing Java access and with native NDB API access to MySQL Cluster
• what the future holds for this technology

Wed, Mar 03: 08:00 Hawaii time
Wed, Mar 03: 11:00 Mountain time (America)
Wed, Mar 03: 12:00 Central time (America)
Wed, Mar 03: 13:00 Eastern time (America)
Wed, Mar 03: 18:00 UTC
Wed, Mar 03: 18:00 Western European time
Wed, Mar 03: 19:00 Central European time
Wed, Mar 03: 20:00 Eastern European time

Register for Part 2 here.

This functionality isn’t GA but it is available for you to try and we’d love to get feedback (which you can provide through the MySQL Cluster forum or by emailing cluster@lists.mysql.com

If you want to see for yourself then take a look at the Blog entry from Bernhard Ocklin – the engineering manager responsible for this work.

MySQL Cluster Performance Tuning Best Practices – Webinar replay available

For anyone that missed the recent webinar on getting the best performance out of MySQL Cluster then the replay is now available from mysql.com.

Benefits of connection pooling

Are you experiencing current performance bottlenecks in your high availability applications ? Are you designing a new mission-critical application and want to know how best to structure your schema and index strategy for optimal performance? Interested in how to transform your SQL into faster, more efficient queries?

Then this free web presentation is for you! You will get expert insight and learn best practices to help you identify those areas of database and application design that will give you the greatest benefits for performance when using MySQL Cluster.

It discusses guidelines and best practices covering the following areas:

• General Design Concepts and Guidelines
• Schema Optimization
  • BLOB/Text vs VARBINARY/VARCHAR
  • Partition by Key
• Index Selection and Tuning
• Basic Query Tuning
• MySQL Cluster Parameter Tuning Guidelines
• Tools to accelerate application development and testing

Using NDBINFO – example of monitoring data nodes with MySQL Enterprise Monitor

You may have read Bernd’s recent post that explained how to try out some new beta functionality for MySQL Cluster and wondered what kind of use you could put the new ndb$info to. ndb$info uses tables/views to give real-time access to a whole host of information that helps you monitor and tune your MySQL Cluster deployment. This article gives one example, extending MySQL Enterprise Monitor to keep an eye on the amount of free memory on the data nodes and then raise an alarm when it starts to run low – even generating SNMP traps if that’s what you need.

One of the features of MySQL Enterprise Monitor is that you can define custom data collectors and that those data collectors can run SQL queries to get the data. The information retrieved by those custom data collectors can then be used with rules that the user defines through the MySQL Enterprise Monitor GUI to create warning/alarms.

In this example, I create two new data collectors and store the files in the “<MySQL Enterprise Monitor installation directory>/agent/share/mysql-proxy/items/” directory before starting up the MySQL Enterprise Monitor agents:

cluster_max_used.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<classes>
  <class>
    <namespace>mysql</namespace>
    <classname>cluster_max_used</classname>
    <query><![CDATA[SELECT MAX(used) as Used FROM ndbinfo.memoryusage
      WHERE DATA_MEMORY = 'DATA_MEMORY']]>
    </query>
  </class>
</classes>

cluster_min_avail.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<classes>
  <class>
    <namespace>mysql</namespace>
    <classname>cluster_min_avail</classname>
    <query><![CDATA[SELECT MIN(max)as Max FROM ndbinfo.memoryusage
       WHERE DATA_MEMORY = 'DATA_MEMORY']]>
    </query>
  </class>
</classes>

Fig. 1 Rule definition

In MySQL Enterprise Monitor, rules are grouped together into Advisors and so I create a new Advisor called “MySQL Cluster” and then create just one new rule within that Advisor group.

As shown in Fig. 1 the rule is called “Data Node Low Memory”. The “Variable Assignment” section is used to define 2 variables %used_mem% and %config_mem% which are populated from the Used and Max results from the 2 new data collectors. The “Expression” section is used to test “(Max - Used) < THRESHOLD” and then the values to be substituted for THRESHOLD are defined in the “Thresholds” section – indicating at what points the Info, Warning and Critical Alters should be raised.

There are then a number of optional sections that you can use to add useful information to the person investigating the alert.

Once the rule has been created, the next step is to schedule it and (if desired) tag that the alerts should also result in SNMP traps being raised. This is standard MySQL Enterprise Monitor practice and so it isn’t explained here except to point out that this rule is monitoring information from the data nodes but the rule has to be applied to a MySQL Server (MySQL Enterprise Monitor has no idea what a data node is) and so you need to schedule the rule against one or more arbitrary MySQL Server instances in the Cluster.

Fig. 2 Warning alert

 
 
To test the functionality, start adding more data to your MySQL Cluster until the Warning alert is triggered as shown in Fig. 2. As you can see, the optional information we included is shown – including values from Used and Max.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Fig. 3 Critical alarm

I then add more data to the database until the critical alert is raised and confirm that it’s displayed on the main monitoring panel of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor dashboard. Note that if you requested these alerts be included with the SNMP feed then SNMP traps will also be raised.

Please note that this example is intended to illustrate the mechanics of setting up monitoring on an arbitrary piece of data from ndbinfo and obviously in the real world you would want to monitor more than just the memory and even for the memory, you might want to use a more sophisticated rule.

New twitter account for MySQL Cluster news

A new twitter account has been created for communicating MySQL Cluster updates – follow it from http://twitter.com/clusterdb

MySQL Cluster 7.0.11 source released

The source version for MySQL Cluster 7.0.11 has now been made available at ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/cluster_telco/mysql-5.1.41-ndb-7.0.11/

This replaces MySQL Cluster 7.0.10.

You can either wait for the binaries to be released or if you’re in a rush then you can find instructions on building the binaries for yourself in the earlier article: “MySQL Cluster 7.0.7 source released“.

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.0.11 (compared to 7.0.11) can be found in the MySQL_Cluster_7_0_11_ChangeLog.