The famous ISP-style mail server tutorial lives here. Learn how to set up your own fully-functional mail server using Postfix, Dovecot IMAP/POP3 and MySQL backend on a Debian server just like your favorite mail or website hosting provider. This guide is a voluntary project with no profit in mind. Go ahead and learn to run your own mail server within hours.

We usually take care of things we value, whether it is an expensive smartphone or the company’s servers. Data is one of the most important assets of the organisation, and although we do not see it, it has to be carefully protected. We implement data at rest encryption to encrypt database files or whole volumes which contain our data. We implement data in transit encryption using SSL to make sure no one can sniff and collect data sent across networks. Backups are no different. No matter if this is a full backup or incremental, it will store at least a part of your data. As such, backups have to be encrypted too. In this blog post, we will look into some options you may have when it comes to encrypting backups. First though, let’s look at how you can encrypt your backups and what could be use cases for those methods.

DBdeployer is a tool that deploys MySQL database servers easily. This is a port of MySQL-Sandbox, originally written in Perl, and re-designed from the ground up in Go. See the features comparison for more detail.

Hybrid replication, i.e. combining Galera and asynchronous MySQL replication in the same setup, became much easier since GTID got introduced in MySQL 5.6. Although it was fairly straightforward to replicate from a standalone MySQL server to a Galera Cluster, doing it the other way round (Galera → standalone MySQL) was a bit more challenging. At least until the arrival of GTID.

utf8mb4In this blog post, we’ll look at options for migrating database charsets to utf8mb4.

Migrating charsets, in my opinion, is one of the most tedious tasks in a DBA’s life. There are so many things involved that can screw up our data, making it work is always hard. Sometimes what seems like a trivial task can become a nightmare very easily, and keeps us working for longer than expected.

Decode mysql replication issues with mysqlbinlog

When discussing disaster recovery, it’s important to take your business’ continuity plan into consideration. Backup and recovery processes are a critical part of any application infrastructure.

A well-tested backup and recovery system can be the difference between a minor outage and the end of your business.

You will want to take three things into consideration when planning your disaster recovery strategy: recovery time objective, recovery point objective and risk mitigation.

Recovery time objective (RTO) is how long it takes to restore your backups. Recovery point objective (RPO) is what point in time you want to recover (in other words, how much data you can afford to lose after recovery). Finally, you need to understand what risks you are trying to mitigate. Risks to your data include (but are not limited to) bad actors, data corruption, user error, host failure and data center failure.

While you can use the database client to check the status of your cluster, the individual nodes and the health of replication, you may find it counterproductive to log into the client on each node to run these checks. Galera Cluster provides a notification script and interface for customization, allowing you to automate the monitoring process for your cluster.

One of our customers had a question related to the right value of Galera Cache size (gcache.size) in Galera Cluster for MySQL which I would like to share with you.

The question was: My maintenance window takes 4 hours for my 5TB DB. How can I avoid an SST ?!

Basically, having too small GCache size will lead to SST (Snapshot State Transfer) instead of IST (Incremental State Transfer), thus we can avoid the SST by setting the GCache to the appropriate value.

State Snapshot Transfer (SST) is a way for Galera to transfer a full data copy from an existing node (donor) to a new node (joiner). If you come from a MySQL replication background, it is similar to taking a backup of a master and restoring on a slave. In Galera Cluster, the process is automated and is triggered depending on the joiner state.

SST can be painful in some occasions, as it can block the donor node (with SST methods like mysqldump or rsync) and burden it when backing up the data and feeding it to the joiner. For a dataset of a few hundred gigabytes or more, the syncing process can take hours to complete - even if you have a fast network. It might be advisable to avoid e.g. when running in WAN environments with slower connects and limited bandwidth, or if you just want a very fast way of introducing a new node in your cluster.

MyCLI is a command line interface for MySQL, MariaDB, and Percona with auto-completion and syntax highlighting.

echo -n foobar | openssl sha1 -binary | openssl sha1 -hex | sed 's/(stdin)= /*/' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]'