Diamond Notes

I have been following MySQL Proxy ever since it started.  It is really cool stuff.

Just recently at work we evaluated some various possibilities or a high availability (HA) setup.  Load balancing would be nice, but that wasn’t the primary point.  Well, we evaluated probably half a dozen alternatives and I believe we have a winner … MySQL Proxy.

With proxy you have something that is fairly simple to set up, can be built with redundancy so you don’t have a SPOF and is very flexible.  In addition to HA we can use it for load balancing, storing all queries that run through the proxy (for auditing) and even modifying queries for various reasons.  There are other uses but I would like to keep this post short.

Because it contains the Lua programming language you really have the ultimate flexibility.  Yesterday I was discussing proxy with our Junior DBA and he said that there were things that haven’t even been thought of yet that will be implemented down the road.  Well, here is on of those things.  Jan Kneschke just announced on his blog here how to use the proxy to determine what query caused an Innodb transactional rollback.  Who would think about using the proxy for this?  Well Jan did.  And I for one am thankful!

If you are a professional MySQL DBA I would recommend you invest some time to understand what MySQL Proxy is all about.  I would also take the time to set it up in a “sandbox” environment so you can start working on it.  I believe that the proxy will be an important part of the MySQL landscape in the years to come.

MySQL Proxy homepage: http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Proxy