Category Archives: continuent

conferences, continuent, percona live, perconalive, Presentations and Conferences

End of an Era: Neither MC nor Continuent Attending Percona Live

Continuent have been a long term sponsor of the Percona Live conference, and the MySQL conference as it was before that, for many years. We have attended the conference both as a Diamond sponsor, and members of our staff attending and presenting our products and experience at the conference.

The nature of these conferences always changes over time, and we have seen over the last few years how the Percona Live conference has moved from being a pure MySQL conference to an open source database conference. Although Continuent continue to provide open source software and integrate with many open source databases, our core operation still revolves around MySQL clustering and replication for MySQL and Oracle.

Continuent is also evolving and changing and we are increasingly deploying and moving towards pure cloud-based environments, building and developing products that are used on the cloud or explicitly leverage cloud computing technology. We have a number of new products and initiatives specifically targeting these areas.

Over the course of the next year we will be releasing cloud editions of our clustering, replication and new backup and proxy services both directly and through our partners.

As such, this year we have made the difficult decision not to sponsor or attend the Percona Live conference, directing our energies to other conferences, webinars and meetups. We will be attending the AWS conference, for example, and we fully intend to be at some other select conferences this year dealing with analytics, in-memory computing, and cloud-based deployments.

To stay up-to-date with what Continuent are doing, keep reading the Continuent blog and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

continuent, percona live, perconalive, Presentations and Conferences, tungsten, tungsten-replicator

Keynote and Session at Percona Live Dublin 2017

On Sunday I will travel over to Dublin for Percona Live 2017.

I have two sessions, a keynote on the Wednesday morning where I’ll be talking about all the fun new stuff we have planned at Continuent and some new directions we’re working on.

I also have a more detailed session on our new appliers for Kafka, Elasticsearch and Cassandra, that’s Tuesday morning.

MCBrown-Keynote.jpg

If you haven’t already booked to come along, feel free to use the discount code SeeMeSpeakPLE17 which will get you 15% off!

continuent, Presentations and Conferences, replication, tungsten-replicator

Upcoming Webinar, 19th July, What is New in Tungsten Replicator 5.2 and Tungsten Clustering 5.2?

Continuent Tungsten 5.2 is just around the corner. This is one of our most exciting Tungsten product releases for some time!

In this webinar we’re going to have a look at a host of new features in the new release, including
Three new Replication Applier Targets (Kafka, Cassandra and Elasticsearch)
New improvements to our core command-line tools trepctl and thl
New foundations for our filtering services, and
Improvements to the compatibility between replication and clustering

This webinar is going be a packed session and we’ll show all the exciting stuff with more in-depth follow-up sessions in the coming weeks.

 

You’ll also learn about some more exciting changes coming in the upcoming Tungsten releases (5.2.1 and 5.3), and our major Tungsten 6.0 release due out by the end of the year.

So come and join us to get the low down on everything related to Tungsten Replicator 5.2 and Tungsten Clustering 5.2. on Wednesday, July 19, 2017 9:00 AM – 9:30 AM PDT at https://attendee.gotowebinar. com/register/ 4108437731342545667

continuent, Presentations and Conferences, tungsten, tungsten-replicator, webinar

New Continuent Webinar Wednesdays and Training Tuesdays

We are just starting to get into the swing of setting up our new training and webinar schedule.
Initially, there will be one Webinar session (typically on a Wednesday) and one training session (on a Tuesday) every week from now. We’ll be covering a variety of different topics at each.
Typically our webinars will be about products and features, comparisons to other products, mixed in with product news (new releases, new features) and individual sessions based on what is going on at Continuent and the market in general.
Our training, by comparison, is going to be a hands-on, step-by-step sequence covering all of the different areas of our product. So we’ll cover everything from the basics of how the products work, how to deploy them, typical functionality (switching, start/stop, etc), and troubleshooting.
All of the sessions are going to be recorded and we’ll produce a suitable archive page so that you can go and view the past sessions. Need a refresher on re-provisioning a node in your cluster? There’s going to be a video for it and documentation to back it up.
Our first webinar is actually next Thursday (the Wednesday rule wouldn’t be a good one without an exception) and is all about MySQL Multi-Site/Multi-Master Done Right:
In this webinar, we discuss what makes Tungsten Clustering better than other alternatives (AWS RDS, Galera, MySQL InnoDB Cluster, and XtraDBCluster), especially for geographically distributed multi-site deployments, both for disaster recovery and multi-site/multi-master needs.
If you want to attend, please go ahead and register using this link: http://go.continuent.com/n0JI04Q03EAV0RD0i000Vo4
Keep your eyes peeled for the other upcoming sessions. More details soon.
big data, cloudera, continuent, hadoop, oscon, oscon2014, Presentations and Conferences

Hadoop BoF Session at OSCON

I have a BoF session next week at OSCON next week:

Migrating Data from MySQL and Oracle into Hadoop

The session is at 7pm Tuesday night – look for rooms D135 and/or D137/138.

Correction: We are now in  E144 on Tuesday with the Hadoop get together first at 7pm, and the Data Migration to follow at 8pm.

I’m actually going to be joined by Gwen Shapira from Cloudera, who has a BoF session on Hadoop next door at the same time, along with Eric Herman from Booking.com. We’ll use the opportunity to talk all things Hadoop, but particularly the ingestion of data from MySQL and other databases into the Hadoop datastore.

As always, it’d be great to meet anybody interested in Hadoop at the BoF, please come along and introduce yourselves, and hopefully I’ll see you next week!

continuent, oracle, replication

Replicating Oracle Webinar Question Follow-up

We had really great webinar on Replicating to/from Oracle earliest this month, and you can view the recording of that Webinar here.

A good sign of how great a Webinar was is the questions that come afterwards, and we didn’t get through them all. so here are all the questions and answers for the entire webinar.

Q: What is the overhead of Replicator on source database with asynchronous CDC?

A: With asynchronous operation there is no substantial CPU overhead (as with synchronous), but the amount of generated redo logs becomes bigger requiring more disk space and better log management to ensure that the space is used effectively.

Q: Do you support migration from Solaris/Oracle to Linux/Oracle?

A: The replication is not certified for use on Solaris, however, it is possible to configure a replicator to operate remotely and extract from a remote Oracle instance. This is achieved by installing Tungsten Replicator on Linux and then extracting from the remote Oracle instance.

Q: Are there issues in supporting tables without Primary Keys on Oracle to Oracle replication?

A: Non-primary key tables will work, but it is not recommended for production as it implies significant overhead when applying to a target database.

Q: On Oracle->Oracle replication, if there are triggers on source tables, how is this handled?

A: Tungsten Replicator does not automatically disable triggers. The best solution is to remove triggers on slaves, or rewrite triggers to identify whether a trigger is being executed on the master or slave and skip it accordingly, although this requires rewriting the triggers in question.

Q: How is your offering different/better than Oracle Streams replication?

A: We like to think of ourselves as GoldenGate without the price tag. The main difference is the way we extract the information from Oracle, otherwise, the products offer similar functionality. For Tungsten Replicator in particular, one advantage is the open and flexible nature, since Tungsten Replicator is open source, released under a GPL V2 license, and available at https://code.google.com/p/tungsten-replicator/.

Q: How is the integrity of the replica maintained/verified?

A: Replicator has built-in real-time consistency checks: if an UPDATE or DELETE doesn’t update any rows, Replicator will go OFFLINE:ERROR, as this indicates an inconsistent dataset.

Q: Can configuration file based passwords be specified using some form of encrypted value for security purposes to keep them out of the clear?

A: We support an INI file format so that you do not have to use the command-line installation process. There is currently no supported option for an encrypted version of these values, but the INI file can be secured so it is only readable by the Tungsten user.

Q: Our source DB is Oracle RAC with ~10 instances. Is coherency maintained in the replication from activity in the various instances?

A: We do not monitor the information that has been replicated; but CDC replicates row-based data, not statements, so typical sequence insertion issues that might occur with statement based replication should not apply.

Q: Is there any maintenance of Oracle sequence values between Oracle and replicas?

A: Sequence values are recorded into the row data as extracted by Tungsten Replicator. Because the inserted values, not the sequence itself, is replicated, there is no need to maintain sequences between hosts.

Q: How timely is the replication? Particularly for hot source tables receiving millions of rows per day?

A: CDC is based on extracting the data at an interval, but the interval can be configured. In practice, assuming there are regular inserts and updates on the Oracle side, the data is replicated in real-time. See https://docs.continuent.com/tungsten-replicator-3.0/deployment-oracle-cdctuning.html for more information on how this figure can be tuned.

Q: Can parallel extractor instances be spread across servers rather than through threads on the same server (which would be constrained by network or HBA)?

A: Yes. We can install multiple replicators and tune the extraction of the parallel extractor accordingly. However, that selection would need to be manual, but certainly that is possible.

Q: Do you need the CSV file (to select individual tables with the setupCDC.sh configuration) on the master setup if you want all tables?

A: No.

Q: If you lose your slave down the road, do you need to re-provision from the initial SCN number or is there a way to start from a later point?

A: This is the reason for the THL Sequence Number introduced in the extractor. If you lose your slave, you can install a new slave and have it start at the transaction number where the failed slave stopped if you know it, since the information will be in the THL. If not, you can usually determine this by examining the THL directly. There should be no need to re-provision – just to restart from the transaction in the THL on the master.

Q: Regarding a failed slave, what if it failed such that we don’t have a backup or wanted to provision a second slave such that it had no initial data.

A: If you had no backups or data, yes, you would need to re-provision with the parallel extractor in order to seed the target database.

Q: Would you do that with the original SCN? If it had been a month or two, is there a way to start at a more recent SCN (e.g. you have to re-run the setupCDC process)?

A: The best case is to have two MySQL slaves and when one fails, you re-provision it from the healthy one. This avoids setupCDC stage.

However, the replication can always be started from a specific event (SCN) provided that SCN is available in the Oracle undo log space.

Q: How does Tungsten handle Oracle’s CLOB and BLOB data types

A: Providing you are using asynchronous CDC these types are supported; for synchronous CDC these types are not supported by Oracle.

Q: Can different schemas in Oracle be replicated at different times?

A: Each schema is extracted by a separate service in Replicator, so they are independent.

Q: What is the size limit for BLOB or CLOB column data types?

A: This depends on the CDC capabilities in Oracle, and is not limited within Tungsten Replicator. You may want to refer to the Oracle Docs for more information on CDC: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28313/cdc.htm

Q: With different versions of Oracle e.g. enterprise edition and standard edition one be considered heterogeneous environments?

A: Essentially yes, although the nomenclature is really only a categorization, it does not affect the operation, deployment or functionality of the replicator. All these features are part of the open source product.

Q: Can a 10g database (master) send the data to a 11g database (slave) for use in an upgrade?

A: Yes.

Q: Does the Oracle replicator require the Oracle database to be in archive mode?

A: Yes. This is a requirement for Oracle’s CDC implementation.

Q: How will be able to revisit this recorded webinar?

A: Slides and a recording from today’s webinar will be available at http://www.slideshare.net/Continuent_Tungsten

 

continuent

A New Home for Tungsten in the UK

I was suitably heartened to hear about the new mine opening up in the Devon here in the UK to mine the element Tungsten.

I comment on this to my associates at Continuent, where comments were made by Csaba as to the appropriate quotes in the article:

“Tungsten is an extraordinary metal.”

“It’s almost as hard as a diamond and has one of the highest melting points of any mineral.”

“Adding a small amount to steel makes it far harder, far more resistant to stress and heat. The benefits to industry are obvious.”

Leading to him to suggest Adding a small amount of Tungsten to MySQL makes it far harder, far more resistant to stress and failures. The benefits to industry are obvious.

I couldn’t possibly agree more!

 

big data, continuent, hadoop, oracle, Presentations and Conferences

Continuent at Hadoop Summit

I’m pleased to say that Continuent will be at the Hadoop Summit in San Jose next week (3-5 June). Sadly I will not be attending as I’m taking an exam next week, but my colleagues Robert Hodges, Eero Teerikorpi and Petri Versunen will be there to answer any questions you have about Continuent products, and, of course, Hadoop replication support built into Tungsten Replicator 3.0.

If you are at the conference, please go along and say hi to the team. And, as always, if there are any questions please let them or me know.