Thursday, February 08, 2018

MySQL Cluster 7.5 inside and out

A new book on MySQL Cluster is out. It is called MySQL Cluster 7.5 inside and out.
It is on its way out to all internet sites. Currently it is accessible on adlibris.se and on
BoD's bookshop and now also cdon.com. They are all in swedish, but with Google
Translate that should be possible to overcome. It will hit most other international book
stores within a week or less.

It is currently available for orders as a printed book, it will become available as an
eBook in 1-2 weeks. The printed book is in bound format since I wanted to make it
possible to read it frequently, it is 640 pages long.

I started development on NDB as my Ph.D research. The first years I did collect requirements
and tried to understand how database internals works. In 1996 the development started.
I wrote my Ph.D thesis in 1998 that stated most of the ideas used in the early versions of
the NDB implementation.

The idea on writing a book about MySQL Cluster have been coming up for me every now
and then since more than 10 years back. However all the time I felt it was more important
to focus on one more feature to develop.

In 2015 I decided that it was more important to write down a description of the features in
NDB. So in 2016 I started writing this book. As usual with book projects they take a lot longer
than expected.

At about the same time Jesper Wisborg Krogh and  Mikiya Okuno also started writing a
book about MySQL Cluster. This is called Pro MySQL NDB Cluster.

So the good news is that we now have two very good books about MySQL Cluster.
Jesper and Mikiyas book is written from the perspective of the DBA that have
decided to use NDB.

My book explains why NDB was developed, it describes a great number of applications
where it fits in. It compares it to other clustering solutions for MySQL.

I wanted to make sure that the first step to install and get started with MySQL Cluster
isn't a showstopper, so I described in some detail how to install it and get up and running
on various platforms. This includes a chapter on MySQL Cluster and Docker. Later
there is also a chapter on using NDB in the cloud.

Next it goes through NDB from an SQL point of view and describes all the things that
are good to understand when working with MySQL Cluster. It goes through the direct
NDB APIs (C++ API, Java API and a Node.js API). It goes through how to import
and export data to/from NDB.

It explains the various ways you can replicate between clusters using MySQL Cluster.
It also explains why those solutions exist and what the problem it is trying to solve is.

We have developed quite a few ndbinfo tables that can be used to gather an understanding
of the cluster in operation. These tables are explained and the purpose of them.

Next I dive into some internals, describing the software architecture, the message flows
and the restarts in NDB. I provide some advices on how to optimise restart times.

Next I dive deep into the configuration of MySQL Cluster, both the cluster configuration
and the MySQL servers. I provide detailed descriptions of how to configure for optimal
performance. I also provide details on the memory impact of many configuration parameters.
The configuration chapters include detailed descriptions of how to setup an optimal
execution environment for NDB, this includes details on how to set up the Linux
infrastructure for optimal performance.

Finally I go through our testing frameworks that we make use. I go through in detail
the benchmark framework I developed for more than 10 years called dbt2-0.37.50
that can be used to benchmark with sysbench, DBT2 and flexAsynch.

Finally the history of MySQL Cluster is provided.


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