MySQL High Availability: Tools for Building Robust Data Centers [Paperback]

Charles Bell (Author), Mats Kindahl (Author), Lars Thalmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 23, 2010

Server bottlenecks and failures are a fact of life in any database deployment, but they don't have to bring everything to a halt. MySQL has several features that can help you protect your system from outages, whether it's running on hardware, virtual machines, or in the cloud. MySQL High Availability explains how to use these replication, cluster, and monitoring features in a wide range of real-life situations.

Written by engineers who designed many of the tools covered inside, this book reveals undocumented or hard-to-find aspects of MySQL reliability and high availability -- knowledge that’s essential for any organization using this database system.

• Explore the binary log, a file for replication that helps in disaster recovery and troubleshooting
• Get techniques for improving response time and handling large data sets
• Monitor database activity and performance, as well as major operating system parameters
• Keep track of what masters and slaves are doing, and deal with failures and restarts, corruption, and other incidents
• Automate key tasks with code from an open source library written by the authors
• Learn techniques for using MySQL in virtualized environments, such as Amazon Web Services
• Use MySQL Cluster to achieve high availability

"MySQL replication is widely deployed but has never been adequately explained. This book changes that." -- Mark Callaghan, MySQL contributor and leader of MySQL engineering efforts at a few of the world's largest Internet companies

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dr. Charles A Bell is a Senior Software Engineer at Oracle. He is currently the lead developer for backup and a member of the MySQL Backup and Replication team. He lives in a small town in rural Virginia with his loving wife. He received his Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005. His research interests include database systems, versioning systems, semantic web, and agile software development.

Dr. Mats Kindahl is a senior software developer working on the MySQL server. He is the main architect and implementor of MySQL's row-based replication and is responsible for strategic development of replication, reengineering, and the plugin architecture. Before starting at MySQL, he did research in formal methods, program analysis, and distributed systems, the area where he earned his doctoral degree in computer science. He has also spent many years developing C/C++ compilers and knows more programming languages than he has fingers.

Dr. Lars Thalmann is the development manager for MySQL replication and backup. He is responsible for the strategy and development of these features and leads the corresponding engineering teams. Thalmann has worked with MySQL development since 2001, when he was a software developer working on MySQL Cluster. More recently, he has driven the creation and development of the MySQL backup feature, has guided the evolution of MySQL replication since 2004, and has been a key player in the development of MySQL Cluster replication. Thalmann holds a doctorate in Computer Science from Uppsala University, Sweden.

Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (July 23, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596807309
• ISBN-13: 978-0596807306
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #281,729 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Really Great MySQL Resource, November 30, 2010

By 

Jim McGaw "Idea Junkie" (SANTA BARBARA, US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: MySQL High Availability: Tools for Building Robust Data Centers (Paperback)

I'm not a DBA, just a lowly web applications developer who happens to use MySQL as a backend most of the time. I've been developing with a lot of nagging questions in my brain: "How do you set up a master-slave replication?" "How do you roll back the database to a past point in time?" (The kinds of nagging questions that, as a Django or Rails developer, tend to be "someone else's problem.")

This is a brilliant and powerful book. I picked this up in the bookstore and couldn't stop reading it. It's not the only resource available on MySQL replication, monitoring, and clustering, and another title, High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More, has a few chapters that overlap with the topics in this book.

That being said, I liked the tone and pace of this book, and it goes more in-depth than many other similar titles that cover the same material. It made concepts stick to my brain like no other MySQL book I've read so far. The authors make the material very accessible, even though it's not easy subject matter. For me, it shed a lot of light on some mysterious MySQL topics.

It's not a beginner's book, but if you've been working comfortably with a MySQL shell at a startup for a while, are interested in digging deeper, and you're looking for an excuse to buy another computer book, this one is definitely worth it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book for MySQL Professionals, October 5, 2011

By 

Ionel Condor "Ionel Condor" (Cluj, ROMANIA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: MySQL High Availability: Tools for Building Robust Data Centers (Paperback)

Well,
I am not a MySQL professional, so my comments bellow shall be taken as a suggestion from a Sr Software Developer, not from a DBA. I used to work many years with Oracle but my experience in MySQL is definitely not as good as in Oracle.

I think that readers of this book shall have a good background in general RDBMS systems, already understand the principles of high availability, being at least medium skilled on how to administer MySQL and eventually they have already deal with issues like monitoring or backup/recovery.

The book is excellent structured and easy to read if you understand the concepts. If you are already skilled with Oracle some of the stuff here will look ancient and so primitive, but keep in mind that is not always easy to sponsor a project that is going to use Oracle.

My favorite chapters are the one about HA environments, a good intro (the first I ever see) about techniques for using MySQL in a cloud environment like Amazon's AWS.

Another argument to convince you to read this book: is full of examples. many books talks about these concepts without giving examples. You will find here sql scripts, PHP code, Python code, screen captures, very practical examples for how to start and stop slave threads, running replication over a PKI infrastructure, monitor the storage engine and many others.

If all these are not enough (believe me, it's a big comprehensive reference, it was not my case to fully use it anyway), so if all these are not enough you will find an appendix really useful: tips and tricks for running and diagnosing (yes, diagnosing) MySQl replication. Here are some tips: what to do when slave stopped, only replicate some rows to slave or how to allow a slave to periodically challenge the master.