MariaDB with Galera available on the IBM Power8 platform

It was a very long time since I wrote something in this blob, but I have been very busy this spring with MariaDB on Power mostly. This has been a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. So, what is this MariaDB on Power thing all about, well I wrote an introduction to the Power platform late last year. Since then a lot of things has happened though.

One thing is that several service providers out there has adopted Power8 as a platform. To be honest, this really isn't sexy, but it is useful and as a user of one of these services, you will just see the same old Linux you are used to, but potentially it is more powerful and reliable. One such provider is OVH, whose service is more known as RunAbove. If you want to try it, you can do so for free for 7 7 days, just go there and off you go.

Another important thing is that MariaDB is now available on Power8 running, RedHat, SUSE or Ubuntu Linux. To get access to this, pop by MariaDB and if you are not yet signed up, then do this now and then go to "My Portal", further to "Downloads" and then select "MariaDB Enterprise and MariaDB Enterprise Cluster". You are now ready to install using the operating system of your choise, but on Power you are, as I said before,limited to SUSE, RedHat and Ubuntu, and if you want to test MariaDB Enterprise Cluster, i.e. MariaDB with Galera, you have to go with Ubuntu.

Installing MariaDB Enterprise Cluster on Power8 is no more complex than on Intel. There are a few thing to adjust before you can get started with this, after having installed the software. The first node has, as usual, to be configured with wsrep_cluster_adress set to gcomm:// to ensure that this first node will bootstrap without having to connect to a cluster. Once the cluster is up and running though, this variable is set to the cluster addresses. In my case, this what the Galera setting look like in /etc/mysql/my.cnf which is the location of this file on Ubuntu.
# Galera
wsrep_provider=/usr/lib/galera/libgalera_smm.so
wsrep_cluster_name="GaleraPower1"
wsrep_cluster_address=gcomm://92.127.22.124
wsrep_node_address=92.127.22.121
wsrep_node_name=galera3
binlog_format=ROW
Note in particular the binlog_format setting. This MUST be set to ROW for Galera to work. But fact is that these setting are not particular to MariaDB on Power, this is the same even on Intel.

Tf this isn't enough to convice you about the advantages of running MariaDB on IBM Power, then see what Foedus in Italy has to say about this combination in this Video:

There is more to say about running MariaDB on Power and there is more to come here, I'll look at some performance data, we'll have a look at MaxScale on Power (this is not official yet, but that isn't stopping me) as well as a blog on how to run a Power8 emulation on Intel which I have promissed before.

So, don't touch that dial!

/Karlsson