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# Month: September 2015

## Percona Live Amsterdam: Community Dinner, last updates

MySQL community PerconaLive September 18, 2015September 18, 2015

Registration for the Percona Live Amsterdam conference community dinner at Booking.com is ongoing. Please note the following:

- By Monday noon the kitchen will make the necessary purchasing. At this time we will have to give them a number, which we will not exceed.
- The number we will give them is $(number of registrants Monday 12:00) + X, X being a constant
- Those X tickets will be available until Tuesday 12:00
- After which the registration is closed. We wish to avoid throwing away food, on one hand, as well as respect those who have reserved place and avoid running out of food, on the other.

Entry to the Booking.com building will be made available via Security personnel to those people who will be listed by the eventbrite registration. We will not be able to have last moment registrants; we will not collect money at the entrance; no credit cards accepted at the doorway.

If you’d like to attend the community dinner, please register now!

FYI Percona has arranged for boats to make the travel from the conference venue to Booking.com (no registration required, but room limited on those boats as well).

Now ain’t I being dramatic here. So happy to see everyone here in Amsterdam in a few days!

## Speaking at Percona Live Amsterdam: Orchestrator

MySQL orchestrator PerconaLive September 15, 2015September 26, 2015

In a week’s time I’ll be speaking at Percona Live Amsterdam. I will be presenting:

> Managing and Visualizing your replication topologies with Orchestrator
> 23 September 4:20PM

This talk will present orchestrator, on which I’ve been working for the last year and a half, originally at Outbrain and now at Booking.com.

I will show off what orchestrator can do to manage your replication topologies. From visualization, through topology refactoring to automated crash recoveries, orchestrator today plays a key role at Booking.com infrastructure, at scale (oh I love using these words).

You can expect an outrageous demo, a visual walkthrough, some command line examples, and a lot on the logic and mechanisms behind orchestrator. I will present the difficult problems orchestrator covers.

orchestrator is free and open source, and is built to be as generic as possible; it is known to be used by multiple well known companies these days, so please join the party.

With that, I conclude with the almighty motto: Continue reading » “Speaking at Percona Live Amsterdam: Orchestrator”

## Three wishes for a new year

MySQL September 14, 2015

Another new year by Jewish calendar. What do I wish for the following year?

1. World peace
2. Good health to all
3. Decent, operations friendly built in online table refactoring

The existing online ALTER TABLE solution is still not there. It does not take into consideration the load on the server. In replication stream it’s serialized just as any other statement. It’s not easy to stop/revert in case of problem.

The existing online-schema-change scripts are still based on my 6-year old original solution, I’m proud to say, but the technology used, i.e. triggers, hasn’t really evolved since then. We are still fighting deadlocks induced by the use of triggers and/or concurrent copying of data. There are still limitations on use of foreign keys.

None of my wishes in previous years [2010], [2011], [2012], [2013], [2014] came true (and mostly gone worse). I’m still willing to settle for two out of three.

## Orchestrator visual cheatsheet, TL;DR the “smart” way

MySQL Open Source orchestrator Pseudo GTID Replication September 2, 2015

Orchestrator is really growing. And the amount of users (DBAs, sys admins) using it is growing. Which gives me a lot of immediate feedback in the form of “Look, there’s just too many options to move slaves around! Which ones should we use?”

### TL;DR look at the two visualized commands below

They are enough

### The “smart” commands to end all commands

So all relocation commands are important, and give you fine-grained, pin-pointed control of the method of topology refactoring. However, most of the time you just want to move those servers around. Which is why there’s a new “smart” mode which support these two commands, which you should be happy using:

- relocate: move a single slave to another position
- relocate-slaves: move all/some slaves of some server to another position.

What makes these commands Smart? You can move slaves around from anywhere to anywhere. And orchestrator figures out the bast execution path. If possible, it uses GTID. Not possible? Is Pseudo-GTID available? Great, using Pseudo-GTID. Oh, are there binlog servers involved? Really simple, use them. None of the above? Orchestrator will use “standard” binlog file:pos math (with limitations). Orchestrator will even figure out if multiple steps are necessary and will combine any of the above.

So you don’t have to remember all the possible ways and options. The visual cheatsheet now boils down to these two:

Let’s take a slightly deeper look Continue reading » “Orchestrator visual cheatsheet, TL;DR the “smart” way”

## Orchestrator 1.4.340: GTID, binlog servers, Smart Mode, failovers and lots of goodies

MySQL Open Source orchestrator Pseudo GTID Replication September 1, 2015September 11, 2015

Orchestrator 1.4.340 is released. Not quite competing with the MySQL latest changelog, and as I haven’t blogged about orchestrator featureset in a while, this is a quick listing of orchestrator features available since my last publication:

- Supports GTID (Oracle & MariaDB)
  - GTID still not being used in automated recovery — in progress.
  - enable-gtid, disable-gtid, skip-query for GTID commands
- Supports binlog servers (MaxScale)
  - Discovery & operations on binlog servers
  - Understanding slave repositioning in a binlog-server architecture
- Smart mode: relocate & relocate-below commands (or Web/GUI drag-n-drop) let orchestrator figure out the best way of slave repositioning. Orchestrator picks from GTID, Pseudo GTID, binlog servers, binlog file:pos math (and more) options, or combinations of the above. Fine grained commands still there, but mostly you won’t need them.
- Crash recoveries (did you know orchestrator does that?):
  - For intermediate master recovery: improved logic in picking the best recovery plan (prefer in-DC, prefer promoting local slave, supporting binlog server topologies, …)
  - For master recovery: even better slave promotion; supports candidate slaves (prefer promoting such slaves); supports binlog server shared topologies
  - Better auditing and logging of recovery cases
  - Better analysis of crash scenarios, also in the event of lost VIPs, hanging connections; emergent checks in crash suspected scenarios
  - recover-lite: do all topology-only recovery steps, without invoking external processes
- Better browser support: used to only work on Firefox and Chrome (and the latter has had issues), the Web UI should now work well on all browsers, at the cost of reduced d3 animation. More work still in progress.
- Faster, more parallel, less blocking operations on all counts; removed a lots of serialized code; less locks.
- Web enhancements
  - More verbose drag-n-drop (operation hint; color hints)
  - Drag-n-drop for slaves-of-a-server
  - Replication/crash analysis dashboard
- Pools: orchestrator can be told about instance-to-pool association (submit-pool-instances command)
  - And can then present pool status (web)
  - Or pool hints within topologies (web)
  - Or queried for all pools (cluster-pool-instances command)
- Other:
  - Supports MySQL 5.7 (tested with 5.7.8)
  - Configurable graphite path for metrics
  - –noop flag; does all the work except for actually changing master on slaves. Shows intentions.
  - Web (or cli which-cluster-osc-slaves command) provide list of control slaves to use in pt-osc operation
  - hostname-unresolve: force orchestrator to unresolve a fqdn into VIP/CNAME/… when issuing a CHANGE MASTER TO
- 3rd party contributions (hey, thanks!) include:
  - More & better SSL support
  - Vagrant templates
- For developers:
  - Orchestrator now go-gettable. Just go get github.com/outbrain/orchestrator
  - Improved build script; supports more architectures

Continue reading » “Orchestrator 1.4.340: GTID, binlog servers, Smart Mode, failovers and lots of goodies”