Announcing MariaDB 10.2 Support – ClusterControl 1.5

Announced as part of the ClusterControl 1.5 release, we now provide full support for MariaDB version 10.2. This new version provides even greater integration with Galera Cluster, MariaDB’s HA solution of choice, and also features enhancements to SQL like window functions, common table expressions, and JSON functions.

MariaDB is the fastest growing open source database, reaching more than 60 million developers worldwide through its inclusion in every major Linux distribution, as well as a growing presence in the world’s leading cloud providers. Its widespread use across Linux distributions and cloud platforms, as well as its ease of use, have quickly made MariaDB the open source database standard for the modern enterprise.

MariaDB Server was listed in the recent OpenStack survey as the number one and two database technologies in use today.

What’s New in Version 10.2?

MariaDB Server 10.1 brought the default built-in integration of Galera Cluster to allows its users to achieve the ultimate in high availability. Severalnines was an early adopter of this clustering technology and was excited to see MariaDB embrace it for HA.

Here are some of the enhancements included in the new 10.2 version as announced by MariaDB…

• SQL enhancements like window functions, common table expressions and JSON functions allow new use cases for MariaDB Server
• Standard MariaDB Server replication has further optimizations
• Many area limitations have been removed, which allows easier use and there is no need for limitation handling on the application level
• MyRocks, a new storage engine developed by Facebook, has been introduced, which will further enrich the use cases for MariaDB Server (NOTE: This new Storage Engine is also now available for MariaDB deployments in ClusterControl, however ClusterControl does not yet support MyRocks specific monitoring.)

Window Functions

Window functions are popular in Business Intelligence (BI) where more complex report generation is needed based on a subset of the data, like country or sales team metrics. Another common use case is where time-series based data should be aggregated based on a time window instead of just a current record, like all rows inside a certain time span.

As analytics is becoming more and more important to end users, window functions deliver a new way of writing performance optimized analytical SQL queries, which are easy to read and maintain, and eliminates the need to write expensive subqueries and self-joins.

Common Table Expressions

Hierarchical and recursive queries are usually implemented using common table expressions (CTEs). They are similar to derived tables in a FROM clause, but by having an identification keyword WITH, the optimizer can produce more efficient query plans. Acting as an automatically created temporary and named result set, which is only valid for the time of the query, it can be used for recursive and hierarchical execution, and also allows for reuse of the temporary dataset. Having a dedicated method also helps to create more expressive and cleaner SQL code.

JSON Functions

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), a text-based and platform independent data exchange format, is used not only to exchange data, but also as a format to store unstructured data. MariaDB Server 10.2 offers more than 24 JSON functions to allow querying, modification, validation and indexing of JSON formated data, which is stored in a text-based field of a database. As a result, the powerful relational model of MariaDB can be enriched by working with unstructured data, where required.

Through the use of virtual columns, the JSON function, JSON_VALUE and the newest indexing feature of MariaDB Server 10.2 on virtual columns, JSON values will be automatically extracted from the JSON string, stored in a virtual column and indexed providing the fastest access to the JSON string.

Using the JSON function JSON_VALID, the new CHECK CONSTRAINTS in MariaDB Server 10.2 guarantee that only JSON strings of the correct JSON format can be added into a field.

Binary Log Based Rollback

The enhanced mysqlbinlog utility delivered with MariaDB Server 10.2 includes a new point-in-time rollback function, which allows a database or table to revert to an earlier state, and delivers binary log based rollback of already committed data. The tool mysqlbinlog is not directly modifying any data, it is generating an “export file” including the reverted statements of the transactions, logged in a binary log file. The created file can be used with the command line client or other SQL tool to execute the included SQL statements. This way all committed transactions up to a given timestamp will be rolled back.

In the case of addressing logical mistakes like adding, changing or deleting data, so far the only possible way has been to use mysqlbinlog to review transactions and fix the problems manually. However, this often leads to data inconsistency because corrections typically only address the wrong statement, thereby ignoring other data dependencies.

Typically caused by DBA or user error, restoring a huge database can result in a significant outage of service. Rolling back the last transactions using point-in-time roll back takes only the time of the extract, a short review and the execution of the reverted transactions – saving valuable time, resources and service.

Why MariaDB?

With several MySQL options to choose from, why select MariaDB as the technology to power your application? Here are some of the benefits to selecting MariaDB…

• MariaDB is built on a modern architecture that is extensible at every layer: client, cluster, kernel and storage. This extensibility provides two major advantages. It allows for continual community innovation via plugins and it makes it easy for customers to configure MariaDB to support a wide variety of use cases from OLTP to OLAP.
• MariaDB develops features and enhancements that are part of its own roadmap, independent from Oracle / MySQL. This allows MariaDB to accept and attract broader community innovation, as well as to add internally developed new features that make it easier to migrate from proprietary systems to open source MariaDB.
• MariaDB is engineered to secure the database at every layer, making it a trusted general-purpose database used in industries such as government and banking that require the highest level security features.
• MariaDB offers support for a variety of storage engines, including NoSQL support, giving its users several choices to determine the one which will work best with their environment.
• MariaDB has deployed many performance enhancing improvements including query optimizations which, in several benchmark tests, let’s MariaDB perform 3-5% better than a similarly configured MySQL environment.

ClusterControl for MariaDB

ClusterControl provides support for each of the top MariaDB technologies…

• MariaDB Server: MariaDB Server is a general purpose database engineered with an extensible architecture to support a broad set of use cases via pluggable storage engines – such as InnoDB, MyRocks and Spider.
  • Built-in asynchronous master/slave replication
  • Dynamic columns that allows different rows to store different data in the same column
  • Built-in encryption
  • Query optimization
  • Improved schema compatibility
• MariaDB Cluster: MariaDB Cluster is made for today’s cloud based environments. It is fully read-write scalable, comes with synchronous replication, allows multi-master topologies, and guarantees no lag or lost transactions.
  • Synchronous replication with no slave lag or lost transactions
  • Active-active multi-master topology
  • Read and write to any cluster node
  • Automatic membership control, with failed nodes dropped from the cluster
  • Automatic node joining
  • True row-level parallel replication
  • Direct client connections, native MariaDB look and feel
  • Both read and write scalability
• MariaDB MaxScale: MariaDB MaxScale is a database proxy that extends the high availability, scalability, and security of MariaDB Server while at the same time simplifying application development by decoupling it from underlying database infrastructure.
  • Includes Database Firewall and DoS protection
  • Read-Write Splitting
  • Data Masking
  • Schema-based Sharding
  • Query Caching