This time of the year it is traditional, at least in the UK, to look back and reflect on the year that is coming to a close. Since we have just produced the release candidate for MaxScale and are looking forward to the GA release early in the New Year, it seems like a good time to reflect on the events that have bought us to this stage in the story of MaxScale.
One of the nice things about the "plug and play" approach of MaxScale is that people constantly find ways of using it that were not originally envisaged when we designed MaxScale. One such configuration that I have heard of from multiple sources is using monitoring outside of MaxScale itself. This post will discuss a little about how monitoring works and how it can be moved outside of MaxScale. In particular a simplified example will be presented which shows how to use the notification mechanism in Galera to control MaxScale's use of the nodes in a Galera cluster.
The MaxScale team have been working hard fixing bugs and improving performance. On Friday we released a update of MaxScale, the pluggable proxy for MySQL and MariaDB, I wanted to write a little about a few of those changes. I will not mention every change, there are release notes that give the list of bugs fixed in this version, but rather highlight a couple of performance related changes and describe the rationale behind them. However before I start on the two items I wanted to discuss just a quick note to say that this version introduces cmake as the means to build MaxScale.
Here we take a look at how one of the example filters supplied with the MaxScale 1.0 beta can answer that simplest of profiling questions - "Which of my database queries run within the MySQL server for the longest time?".
Part 1 of this blog post told the story of creating a binlog router for MaxScale that could connect to a MySQL Replication Master, download the binlog file from that master and store them locally on the MaxScale server. This post will concentrate on the other side of the router, the interaction with the MySQL slaves that will see MaxScale as the replication master.
Mark Riddoch, one of the MaxScale team, describes how a MaxScale plugin was developed for booking.com that allows the proxy to be used to reduce the load placed on the master in large MySQL replication environments.
The server weighting feature of MaxScale may initially be seen as a way to influence load balancing for unequal servers, but it can also be useful for other reasons. Here we look at how we can use it to segregate different workloads within a cluster of MariaDB or MySQL servers.
MaxScale is a modular proxy application, the modules can be considered as the building blocks of your proxy implementation within your MySQL database environment. It is important to know what building blocks you have at your disposal. The release of version 1.0 as a beta means that the number of available modules has grown once again. Normally I post about the incremental changes in what is available, but I thought that maybe it was a good time to post a short summary of all the modules. This is not designed to be comprehensive documentation for the functionality available, merely as a summary of what is available.
I have spent some time thinking about and working on a project that went public on GitHub at the beginning of this year. That project is called MaxScale and is primarily a proxy server for MySQL/MariaDB databases, although it can be something much more than this. The obvious and often asked question is why do we need another proxy? I want to try to give you a flavor for what MaxScale is and why I think there is a need for a tool like MaxScale. The architecture of MaxScale makes it different from your average proxy
The best way to get started with MariaDB TX or MariaDB AX is to download it right now!