Restart MySQL server without disrupting users - mysql

What are some generally accepted strategies for restarting a MySQL server on a busy website without interrupting current users? I am using a LAMP setup. I don't mind taking down the site for a time if need be, but if certain user activities are interrupted I could wind up with corrupted data. I do have the ability to bring up a second server if that helps in the transition. I need a solution that results in no corrupted data / data loss.
I suspect this could be a common problem without an easy solution, but not sure what the best approach would be. Any guidance would be appreciated.
Thanks, Brian

Any solution for high availability depends on redundancy.
The most popular strategy today is to run two MySQL servers. Configure the two servers to replicate bidirectionally. This comes with its own challenges; you must manage your applications carefully to write to only one server at a time, to avoid creating update conflicts. When you need to restart one MySQL server, switch your apps to use the other MySQL server.
Even with this configuration, you can't make the switchover without interrupting connections, even if the interruption is brief.
Another solution is MySQL Cluster, in which both MySQL Servers and storage are redundant, but this is also complex to set up and manage, requires high-end hardware resources, and shards your data in ways that make it hard to optimize for general SQL queries.

Related

Django and mysql on different servers performance

I hvae django app that needs to be extremely fast, and it works good for now.
So my question is, is it better to put django app on one server and mysql on another server, or on one server both?
I ask because of communication between then.
I use digitalocean, and both are on one server.
It depends how well the application is written.
Poorly written django will generate a lot of queries so maybe it's beneficial to have it on the same server. Well written Django should leverage the database to do the heavy lifting, in which case its better to have it on a separate server, so the server can be tuned for a database. (In general having a separate database server is the way to go).
The best thing to do would be to add Django debug toolbar to your application and see if it is generating a lot of queries or not, and tune the application from there.
You have couple of options but let's stick to these two.
One server for everything
Good for setting up an application quickly, as it is the simplest setup possible, but it offers little in the way of scalability and component isolation.
There are a lot of pros, it's fast, simple to work with. It does not meet latency problems. From cons: you cannot horizontally scale.
Server for web application and server for database.
First of all, I would recommend to use Postgres, since the latest version (9.6) can now work on multiple cores, which makes it way faster than mysql.
It is good for setting up an application quickly, but keeps application and database from fighting over the same system resources.
From pros it does not fight over resources (RAM / CPU / I/O).
It may also increase security by removing database from DMZ.
From cons, it is harder to setup and when high-latency is going on, the queries might take longer to execute.
To sum up. I would use first option for small and medium applications which does not require a lot of requests.
I would consider moving DB to another server/servers, whenever the application hosts thousands of users per day.

One or multiple databases per Docker container

Let's say I have several different containers and each one of them uses it's own database. What is the best practice in this case regarding performance? Run one container, say a MySQL server, with all the databases in there or run one database server container per database?
Any other comment besides the performance would be welcome.
Since Docker container overhead is not significant and negligible here, the question is more about architecture in a microservices paradigm.
Performance is indeed a complex question and there is no general advice, but maybe the following will help you:
Personally, I doubt that at the beginning of the project one should try to solve all possible performance problems in advance (#MVP, #agile)
However, correct me, but it looks like you have not many resources (one host?) and want to be thrifty with these resources in advance.
Ok, what is your biggest concern now?
RAM is a concern
Then having two concurrent MySQL instances on the same host is maybe not that good (but not a problem for different setups)
For one host I would propose to start using one Database container but create different schemas.
It might involve additional work with standard container (https://forums.docker.com/t/multiple-databases-in-official-mysql-container/8324)
Other concerns
I would not care too much now and start with separate databases from the beginning.
Being able to separate your services horizontal to the databases is a huge value! I would not want to weaken this design decision because of very theoretical future performance issues.
You'd want to use a single database server, preferably running a shell you can attach to for administration, sharing either a Unix socket, a port or both to linked containers. This means you'll have an easier time managing the database container as a service, tweaking performances, monitoring usage, backing up volumes, etc.
Granted, there might be non-standard situations where you might want to have independent servers, for instance running servers with isolated host resources, users, databases, though I'm certain this shouldn't apply to developer environments.

MySQL Load Balancing

We have 6 Servers (4 Applications servers and 2 DB Servers)
We are using HAProxy to load balance between the Application and API servers (2/2)
Now the issue I'm having is that the system administrator setup a Master/Slave on the MySQL but it's always failing and until now we cannot use the slave since most data are always corrupted and we always need to fix it and each time we are getting different errors .
We tried to make some sort of load balancing for the read/write (write on master , read on slave) but we were not able to use that since slave data are not always correct .
What I'm wondering is how the big guys proceed when dealing with high load servers where you always need the data to be accurate and cannot take any risk?
Can someone tell me his own experience and what he used ?
What i found : Percona XtraDB Cluster , but before going into this direction need input ...
Thank's !!
You can choose MySQL/MariaDB+ Percona + HAproxy. This combination support Master- Master synchronization and Data sync work really well. The most of the Real-time Data synchronization has Issue with primary and foreign Key. You can avoid those issue too using Percona. Go ahead and Good Luck
The "table is full" error means your slave doesn't have enough space to perform the ALTER TABLE. You need to get larger disks to resolve that error.
But the subtext is that no one is monitoring your database servers, and that's a bigger problem. You need to get a database administrator, or else get a professional service to do it.
What I'm wondering is how the big guys proceed when dealing with high load servers where you always need the data to be accurate and cannot take any risk?
First, get it out of your head that any system has no risk. That's impossible, if you plan to use the system at all. You can't eliminate the possibility of errors, but you can be prepared to recover from them seamlessly.
The big guys do the following:
Hire operations staff including system administrators, network administrators, database administrators to take care of the servers.
Monitor everything. Use software to track system load, disk space, errors, and many other things continuously. The best option is New Relic. For MySQL slave integrity, use a tool like pt-table-checksum.
Redundancy. Create standby systems and data to take over when (not if) the primary system fails.
You probably want to learn about the field of high availability architecture. Check out this talk: Scalable Internet Architectures
Get on amazon ec2. You can launch 4 app server along with 2 db servers on the fly and set up load balancing using aws engineering features.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/elb-getting-started.html#define-load-balancer
https://aws.amazon.com/articles/1639

Mysql remote synch

We currently have an application located on a remote server, and our call center uses this application to perform customer transactions.
We plan to setup asterisk on a local server to help us with all the call routing and recording, for asterisk to work smoothly we have to move our application from the remote server to the local.
Its will be easy to mover all data to the local server and do transactions locally, but there is an option for users to do transactions online too which will hit the remote server database.
The reason we still have the remote application because of the reliable infrastructure and backup solution provided by rackspace.
If we move application to local server i am looking at a reliable solution for syncing remote and local databases so that we can handle local as well as online transactions.
Why not use mysql master-master replication and hold definitive data at both ends? (Note you'll have to do some reading on on auto_increment_increment and auto_increment_offset)
symcbean's answer is basically correct. I'd add this article as a good starting place to understand master-master replication. I'd further recommend High Performance MySQL as a good reference for a deeper understanding of the techniques and issues.
There are some issues that you will have to face doing writes to two non-colocated MySQL servers. You'll have replication lag to deal with, so the databases won't necessarily be completely in sync, but will only be "eventually consistent". Also, if you have both sides doing updates on content, you can end up with data integrity issues. If your system leans towards INSERTs more then UPDATES for the write operations, it is less likely that you'll run into issues. Also, if the subset of data that is likely to be modified tends to be localized around one or the other of the servers, you'll run into fewer issues.
Otherwise, you'll probably want to roll your own solution that is designed towards the specific use cases of your application.

Which server can I decide for MySQL, windows or Unix/Linux/Ubuntu/Debian?

I'm working on a SaaS project and mysql is our main database. Our applications is written on c# .net and runs under an windows 2003 server.
Considering maintainance, cost, options and performance, which server plattaform can I decide for MySQL hosting, windows or Unix/Linux/Ubuntu/Debian?
The scenario is as following:
The server I run today has a modarate transaction volume. Databases increase 5MB daily and we expect to increase 50MB in couple of months and it is mission critical.
I don't know how big the database is going to be. We rent a VPS to host application and database server.
Most of our queries are simple but our ORM Tool makes constantly use of subqueries. Also we run reports simple and heavy ones. Some them runs after user click, but most runs in order to the queue.
Buy an extra co-lo space will be nice as we got more clients. That's SaaS project after all.
When developing, you can use your Windows box to also run a MySQL server. If and when you
want to have your DBMS in a separate server it can be in either a Windows or Linux server.
MySql and supporting tools for backup etc probably have more choices in Linux.
There are also 3rd party suppliers who will host your MySQL database on their servers. The benefit is they will handle backups, maintenance etc.
Also: look into phpMyAdmin for use as a great admin tool.
Larry
I think you need more information to make an informed decision. It's hard to just pull out a "best" answer based on no specific information.
What is your expected transaction volume?
How big will the database get?
How complex are your queries, ie are they long running or relatively quick?
Are you hosting the application on your own server at your own location? If you have to buy extra co-lo space maybe an extra server isn't the best option.
How "mission critical" is this database? Ie maybe you need replicated servers to ensure stability.
There is a server sizing tool online at http://www.sizinglounge.com/, so you should check that out. It sounds like your server could be smaller than their smallest tier, but it should be a good place to start.
If this is a mission critical application you need to do some kind of replication to an extra server in case the primary one fails, so you are definitely looking at two systems. This has to be in addition to a good backup plan.
Given that you are uncertain about how big it could get you might just continue renting a server. For your backup one idea would be to look at running MySQL on an Amazon EC2 instance. BTW it is important to have a remote replicated server. If you have two systems next to each other and an environmental problem comes up, they could both be out of commission at the same time. But with a remote copy your options are open to potentially working around it.
If you run a lot of read-only queries locally and have your site hosted somewhere, it might make sense to set up a local replicated database copy to query against. That could potentially improve both your website and local performance quite a bit. Plus it would give you some good piece of mind having a local copy under your control.
HTH,
Brandon