joerg's blog

Most (relational) DBAs and DB application developers know the concept of a primary key (“PK”) and what it is good for. However, much too often one still encounters table definitions without a PK. True, the relational theory based on sets does not need a PK, and all operations (insert, select, update, delete) can also be done on tables for which no PK was defined. If performance doesn’t matter (or the data volume is small, a typical situation in tests), the lack of a PK does not immediately cause negative consequences.

For this phenomenon, the relevant documentation is here: deleting files. Close to the top, see this sentence:

Typically, on a single machine (be it a physical or a virtual one) only a single MySQL instance (process) is running. This is perfectly ok for all those situations where a single instance is sufficient, like for storing small amounts of data (RedHat using MySQL for postfix, KDE using it for akonadi, …), as well as those where a dedicated machine per MySQL instance is appropriate (high CPU load, memory fully loaded, availability requirements).

Time flies, and my blogging frequency is quite low. More frequent would be better, but knowing myself I’ll rather not promise anything ;-)

or

xfs Users, Take Care!

Recently, we had a customer ask: Why do many files holding my data take up vastly more space than their size is? That question may sound weird to you, but it is for real, and the customer’s observation was correct. For a start, let’s make sure we are using the same terms.

“Split Brain” is the term commonly used for a cluster whose nodes have different contents, rather than identical as they should have. Typically, a “split brain” situation is the DBA’s nightmare, and the Galera software is designed to avoid it. Galera is very successful in that avoidance, and it needs some special steps by the DBA to achieve “split brain”. Here is how to do it - or, for most DBAs, what to avoid doing to not get a split-brain cluster.

With Galera version 25.3.10, the “garbd” daemon would not start unless I appended the port number (default: 4567) to the IP addresses of the cluster nodes.
The failure symptom was that an exception “gu::NotSet” was thrown, without any helpful information what it was really missing.

The press, be it the general daily newspaper or the computer magazines, is currently informing the public about an upcoming leap second, which will be taken in the night from June 30 to July 1 at 00:00:00 UTC. While we Europeans will enjoy our well-deserved sleep then, this will be at 5 PM (17:00) local time on June 30 for Califormia people, and during the morning of July 1 for people in China, Japan, Korea, or Australia. (Other countries not mentioned for the sake of brevity.) This is different from last time, when the leap second was taken in the night from Saturday to Sunday (2012-July-1 00:00:00 UTC), so it was a weekend everywhere on the globe.

At FromDual, we are currently preparing for our participation in the “Chemnitzer Linux-Tage” in March.
While we don’t yet know whether the programme committee accepted our proposed talks, we will have a booth and hope for interesting exchanges with others from the MySQL, database, Linux, … world. Of course, we will also mention that we are looking for additional colleagues - there are so many tasks that we need more people to handle them all. (In case you got curious, look here: http://www.fromdual.com/mysql-dba-2014-12-de )

… show that this is expected behavior:

• Galera will replicate a DDL statement first, before it gets executed locally.
• Local execution will fail, because the "super" privilege is a global one, it cannot be granted for a specific database "db.*" but only for all of them "*.*"
• Of course, execution on the other nodes will fail in the same way.

For some time already, FromDual’s “Our Team” page lists me, and it even reveals that I joined in September, 2014. Also for some time, the list of FromDual blogs contains an entry “Jörg’s Blog”, but it doesn’t lead to any entries. It is high time to fix this and create entries, starting with an introduction of myself.