First Enterprise Application to Prove MySQL Supports Immense Scale
JAVAONE?San Francisco, Calif. - News Release:
About the tests:
Supporting Quotes:
“For growing web-driven companies, scaling their web applications is critical to their business. Traffic is unpredictable and can grow exponentially. Operations teams must not only monitor every component of their application stack, but quickly respond if things go wrong. These performance results prove that the combination of Hyperic and MySQL is a good fit for companies that need a massively scalable web infrastructure.? — Paul Melmon, senior vice president of engineering at Hyperic
?MySQL has been designed and optimized to handle the fast-growth and high-traffic requirements of today?s modern online applications. As Hyperic is also targeting this same Web audience, there is a natural synergy between our products. MySQL and Hyperic address enterprise-level needs for performance, scalability, availability and reliability.? –Zack Urlocker, vice president of products, Sun Microsystems Database Group
“Support for MySQL has proven to be a major win for Hyperic customers by offering a scalable, enterprise class data store with the array of features they demand to handle reliable backup, archive, and disaster recovery of the highly valuable data Hyperic HQ captures. Since the official release in late January, we’ve had about a quarter of our Enterprise customers either migrate or express interest in migrating to MySQL as a database backend.” –Marty Messer, director of customer success at Hyperic
Supporting resources:
The first release of Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta is now available for download. This exciting new release is designed to provide a more powerful ?single pane of glass? to monitor, diagnose and manage today?s complex, custom, web-based IT environments. In addition, significant infrastructure enhancements to the core Hyperic HQ platform were added to deliver the most scalable and manageable enterprise monitoring software available in open source.
New Diagnostics and Visibility
Today?s IT administrators deal with an increasing burden of disparate technologies, and changing resources to monitor and maintain. Typically, they rely on a variety of utilities and diagnostic tools to ensure and restore availability to their systems. Hyperic HQ 3.2 introduces three new capabilities that provide both new and existing users of HQ a single console to manage all layers of their infrastructure:
More Scalable, Manageable Infrastructure
Hyperic HQ users run some of the largest website and web applications in the world. Providing monitoring and management capablities at this scale can be a daunting task, but it doesn?t have to be. Hyperic HQ 3.2 introduces powerful infrastructure enhancements to ensure maximum visibility with minimum overhead:
This release is intended for early preview and community participation in perfecting this release. It is not recommended to replace your current HQ production environments. The GA release of Hyperic HQ 3.2 will be available later this winter and will support a direct upgrade from your current Hyperic HQ 3.x environment. For more information on the Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta see the release notes. Download today and be sure to participate in our user forums and bug forums.
Expanded Community Rewards Program
To encourage the community even further to participate in improving the quality of both the new Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta, as well as Hyperic HQ installations in production today, we have extended the Hyperic Community Rewards Program. The program now provides members new points awarded for identifying new bugs, fixing reported bugs and contributing new plugins or HOWTOs for the HQ platform. Various rewards are available to power users who contribute at significant levels.
The built-in HQ database is PostgreSQL. Recently, users have been discovering PostgreSQL has a certain limitation: it will not execute more than 2 billion transactions between vacuums. In rare cases, an HQ built-in database can get into this state.
If this happens, the database will stop accepting connections and HQ, which needs a data store, will obviously cease to operate properly. The immediate symptom will be that users will not be able to log in to HQ and the message displayed on the screen will be The backend datasource is unavailable.

That error is not enough to say for sure that the problem is PostgreSQL avoiding wraparound failure by not accepting connections. A quick look at the hqdb.log can confirm. The telltale log entries look like this:
FATAL: database is not accepting commands to avoid wraparound data loss in database "postgres"
HINT: Stop the postmaster and use a standalone backend to vacuum database "postgres".
Happily, postgres tells you how to solve the problem. It’s not very specific, though so I’ll add some details.
The first thing to do is immediately shut HQ down (including the built-in database). Next, start just the database in single-user mode. Technically, you only really need to run a VACUUM, but since we’re here, we might as well be thorough and run VACUUM FULL ANALYZE.
I’ve created a script to start the built-in HQ database in single-user mode. It’s a slightly modified version of the db-start.sh script that is included in HQ installations. It takes one argument which is the name of the database to start up. The database name to VACUUM is specified in the hqdb.log message (it is “postgres” in the message above). Start the database with the script and you will get dropped into the psql command line. Run the VACUUM and exit. Looks something like this:
$ bin/db-start-single-user-8.1.sh postgres
PostgreSQL stand-alone backend 8.1.2
backend> VACUUM FULL ANALYZE;
VACUUM
backend>
When it’s done, you send an EOF (usually control-D) to exit the shell and shut down the database. At this point, you’re done and you can start HQ normally. Things will work and will usually perform much faster.
For more information on this PostgreSQL, check their documentation on how to avoid running into it to begin with.