Experiences

with MySQL

James Hetherington

Introduction

1. University of Nottingham background

2. Local Hosting Services

3. Global Service Provision

4. Oracle Commercial Offerings

1. Oracle Support

2. Enterprise Server options

3. MySQL Enterprise Monitor

5. MySQL Cluster / NDB

6. Next Steps

7. Questions and close

Background – Key Facts

• Ranked in the UK and European top 30 and in the top 1 per

cent of all universities worldwide

• Russel Group member – one of 24 ‘leading UK universities

which are committed to maintaining the very best research, an

outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled

links with business and the public sector’

• Significant local economic impact

• 44.5K students, UK and overseas

• 6.8K staff members

nstopping there…….

Background - Systems

Libraries, Research

and Learning Services:• Research Applications

• Research Data Management

• Collaboration

• Lecture Capture

• High Performance Computing

• Business Intelligence

• Student Experience

Core Systems:

Local ‘database hosting’ services

2007 September – ‘Research’ and ‘Corporate’ hosts created.

Pre 2007 – multiple stand alone physical databases

created primarily by Schools.

• Solaris host

• MySQL 5.0.45

• SAN storage

• Centos host

• MySQL 5.0.2

• nfs storage

A success! But …

• Little central focus given

• Ownership of DBs transient

• No quality control of application or DBs

• The years pass …

Global Service Provision

2012 – Key Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) service

moved from WebCT on Oracle to Moodle on MySQL

• Solaris hosts with RSF

failover

• MySQL 5.5 Community

Server

• SAN storage

• NFS storage

• Initial application setup trouble free

• Poor application scalability

• Erratic application performance

• Employed DBA contractors, who refined key tuneables

• Issues with server resources and disks on shared hosts

• Engaged with Oracle Consultancy, then increased

engagement with Oracle Support

• Moodle application preferred

• General preference for Open Source

• Dislike of Oracle database from both

Microsoft and Open Source lobbies

• Confidence in MySQL

• Feeling of better fit for Moodle

Did it “just work”?

Global Service Provision

VLE Database architecture from 2014 onwards

• Physical Dell Ubuntu boxes

• 32 core

• 128 GB RAM

• Internal spinning and SSD disks

• Enterprise Server MySQL 5.6.x

with Enterprise Thread Pool and

Enterprise Audit

• tmpdir to ramdisk

• Master Slave replication,

between data centres.

• Initially with Corosync / Heartbeat /

Pacemaker failover management

• Monitored by MySQL Enterprise

Manager

• Other non DB architectural features

needed to meet scaling needs of

Service

Oracle Support

• Require 24x7 Support on key services

• Prefer to deal with vendors of specific product

• Enterprise Server (plugins and hot fixes)

• MySQL Enterprise Monitor

• My Oracle Support

• Consultative Support

• Cost Effective

Verdict?

MySQL Enterprise Manager

• Easy to install

• Non invasive on production

services

• Pre-loaded with best practice

based alerts

• Time Series graphs

• Query Analyzer

• Can look back into the past

MySQL Cluster / NDB

2015 - Online Assessments service

Previous architecture: Solaris Zone, with RSF and SAN storage

Needed to be:

• Robust

• Performant

• Scalable

• Fully supported (hardware, OS, database, apache)

• Quickly implemented

MySQL Cluster / NDB

Online Assessments service

New architecture: Centos VMs split over 2 sites

MySQL Cluster / NDB

Commercial MySQL Cluster:

• Met requirements - reliable / scalable

• 24x7 Support

• Likely to need Oracle Support

• MySQL Cluster Manager

• Can patch with seconds of downtime

Be aware:

• Different technology from normal MySQL

• Needs solid administrators

• Needs solid network infrastructure with low latency

• Short transactions by PK essential

• Loading/restoring SQL data very slow, can appear to crash

• Need to script backups, OOM rating and stats gathering

Verdict?

Next Steps

• MySQL Enterprise Backup

• VLE service to 5.7.x DB

• Assessments to Cluster 7.5.x/MySQL 5.7.x

• Hosting Services to MySQL 5.7.x

• MySQL Router / MySQL Group Replication

• Trial Cloud platforms

• Security

• Transparent Data Encryption

• Encryption

• Enterprise Firewall

When we get the time!

Questions?