Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]
Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views
MongoDB Approach to Availability
Another thing I find interesting about MongoDB is its approach to Durability, Data Consistency and Availability. It is very relaxed and will not work for some applications but for others it can be usable in current form. Let me explain some concepts and compare it to technologies in MySQL space. First I think MongoDB is [...]
MongoDB Approach to database synchronization
I went to MongoSF today – quite an event, and I hope to have a chance to write more about it. This post is about one replication problem and how MongoDB solves it. If you’re using MySQL Replication when your master goes down it is possible for some writes to be executed on the master, [...]
Finding your MySQL High-Availability solution – The questions
After having reviewed the definition my the previous post (The definitions), the next step is to respond to some questions. Do you need MySQL High-Availability? That question is quite obvious but some times, it is skipped. It can also be formulated “What is the downtime cost of the service?”. In the cost, you need to [...]
Looking at Redis
Recently I had a chance to take a look at Redis project, which is semi-persistent in memory database with idea somethat similar to memcache but richer feature set. Redis has simple single process event driven design, which means it does not have to deal with any locks which is performance killer for a lot of [...]
Just how useful are binary logs for incremental backups?
We’ve written about replication slaves lagging behind masters before, but one of the other side effects of the binary log being serialized, is that it also limits the effectiveness of using it for incremental backup. Let me make up some numbers for the purposes of this example: We have 2 Servers in a Master-Slave topology. [...]
When would you use SAN with MySQL ?
One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?
KISS KISS KISS
When I visit customers quite often they tell me about number of creative techniques they heard on the conferences, read on the blogs, forums and Internet articles and they ask me if they should use them. My advice is frequently – do not. It is fun to be creative but creative solutions also means unproven [...]
Fighting MySQL Replication Lag
The problem of MySQL Replication unable to catch up is quite common in MySQL world and in fact I already wrote about it. There are many aspects of managing mysql replication lag such as using proper hardware and configuring it properly. In this post I will just look at couple of query design mistakes which [...]
Troubleshooting Relay Log Corruption in MySQL
Have you ever seen the replication stopped with message like this: Last_Error: Could not parse relay log event entry. The possible reasons are: the master’s binary log is corrupted (you can check this by running ‘mysqlbinlog’ on the binary log), the slave’s relay log is corrupted (you can check this by running ‘mysqlbinlog’ on the [...]

