CLI Online Deployment - Debian Distribution

Introduction

Installing SingleStore on bare metal, on virtual machines, or in the cloud can be done through the use of popular configuration management tools or through SingleStore’s management tools.

In this guide, you will deploy a SingleStore cluster onto physical or virtual machines and connect to the cluster using a SQL client.

A four-node cluster is the minimal recommended cluster size for showcasing SingleStore as a distributed database with high availability; however, you can use the procedures in this tutorial to scale out to additional nodes for increased performance over large data sets or to handle higher concurrency loads. To learn more about SingleStore’s design principles and topology concepts, see Distributed Architecture.

Note

There are no licensing costs for using up to four license units for the leaf nodes in your cluster. If you need a larger cluster with more/larger leaf nodes, please create an Enterprise License trial key.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial you will need:

  • One (for single-host cluster-in-a-box for development) or four physical or virtual machines (hosts) with the following:

    • Each SingleStore node requires at least four (4) x86_64 CPU cores and eight (8) GB of RAM per host

    • Eight (8) vCPU and 32 GB of RAM are recommended for leaf nodes to align with license unit calculations

    • Running a 64-bit version of RHEL/AlmaLinux 7 or later, or Debian 8 or later, with kernel 3.10 or later

      For SingleStore 8.1 or later, glibc 2.17 or later is also required.

    • Port 3306 open on all hosts for intra-cluster communication. Based on the deployment method, this default can be changed either from the command line or via cluster file.

    • Port 8080 open on the main deployment host for the cluster

    • A non-root user with sudo privileges available on all hosts in the cluster that be used to run SingleStore services and own the corresponding runtime state

  • SSH access to all hosts

  • A connection to the Internet to download required packages

If running this in a production environment, it is highly recommended that you follow our host configuration recommendations for optimal cluster performance.

Duplicate Hosts

As of SingleStore Toolbox 1.4.4, a check for duplicate hosts is performed before SingleStore is deployed, and will display a message similar to the following if more than one host has the same SSH host key:

✘ Host check failed.host 172.26.212.166 has the same ssh
host keys as 172.16.212.165, toolbox doesn't support
registering the same host twice

Confirm that all specified hosts are indeed different and aren’t using identical SSH host keys. Identical host keys can be present if you have instantiated your host instances from images (AMIs, snapshots, etc.) that contain existing host keys. When a host is cloned, the host key (typically stored in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_<cipher>_key) will also be cloned.

As each cloned host will have the same host key, an SSH client cannot verify that it is connecting to the intended host. The script that deploys SingleStore will interpret a duplicate host key as an attempt to deploy to the same host twice, and the deployment will fail.

The following steps demonstrate a potential remedy for the duplicate hosts message. Please note these steps may slightly differ depending on your Linux distribution and configuration.

sudo root
ls -al /etc/ssh/
rm /etc/ssh/<your-ssh-host-keys>
ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/<ssh-host-key-filename> -N '' -t rsa1
ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/<ssh-host-rsa-key-filename> -N '' -t rsa
ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/<ssh-host-dsa-key-filename> -N '' -t dsa

For more information about SSH host keys, including the equivalent steps for Ubuntu-based systems, refer to Avoid Duplicating SSH Host Keys.

As of SingleStore Toolbox 1.5.3, sdb-deploy setup-cluster supports an --allow-duplicate-host-fingerprints option that can be used to ignore duplicate SSH host keys.

Network Configuration

Depending on the host and its function in deployment, some or all of the following port settings should be enabled on hosts in your cluster.

These routing and firewall settings must be configured to:

  • Allow database clients (e.g. your application) to connect to the SingleStore aggregators

  • Allow all nodes in the cluster to talk to each other over the SingleStore protocol (3306)

  • Allow you to connect to management and monitoring tools

Protocol

Default Port

Direction

Description

TCP

22

Inbound and Outbound

For host access. Required between nodes in SingleStore tool deployment scenarios. Also useful for remote administration and troubleshooting on the main deployment host.

TCP

443

Outbound

To get public repo key for package verification. Required for nodes downloading SingleStore APT or YUM packages.

TCP

3306

Inbound and Outbound

Default port used by SingleStore. Required on all nodes for intra-cluster communication. Also required on aggregators for client connections.

The service port values are configurable if the default values cannot be used in your deployment environment. For more information on how to change them, see:

We also highly recommend configuring your firewall to prevent other hosts on the Internet from connecting to SingleStore.

Install SingleStore Tools

The first step in deploying your cluster is to download and install the SingleStore Tools on one of the hosts in your cluster. This host will be designated as the main deployment host for deploying SingleStore across your other hosts and setting up your cluster.

These tools perform all major cluster operations including downloading the latest version of SingleStore onto your hosts, assigning and configuring nodes in your cluster, and other management operations. For the purpose of this guide, the main deployment host is the same as the designated Master Aggregator of the SingleStore cluster.

Note: If SingleStore is installed as a sudo user via packages, systemd will automatically start the associated SingleStore processes when a host is rebooted.

Online Installation - Debian Distribution

  1. Verify you have apt-transport-https installed.

    apt-cache policy apt-transport-https

    If apt-transport-https is not installed, you must install it before proceeding.

    sudo apt -y install apt-transport-https
  2. SingleStore packages are signed to ensure integrity, so the GPG key needs to be added to this machine.

    wget -O - 'https://release.memsql.com/release-aug2018.gpg' 2>/dev/null | sudo apt-key add - && apt-key list

    Without using apt-key:

    wget -q -O - 'https://release.memsql.com/release-aug2018.gpg' | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/memsql.asc 1>/dev/null
  3. Add the SingleStore repository to retrieve its packages.

    echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://release.memsql.com/production/debian memsql main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/memsql.list
  4. Run the following to install SingleStore Tools.

    sudo apt update && sudo apt -y install singlestoredb-toolbox singlestore-client

Deploy SingleStore

Prerequisites

Warning

Before deploying a SingleStore cluster in a production environment, please review and follow the host configuration recommendations. Failing to follow these recommendations will result in sub-optimal cluster performance.

In addition, SingleStore recommends that each Master Aggregator and child aggregator reside on its own host when deploying SingleStore in a production environment.

Notes on Users and Groups

The user that deploys SingleStore via SingleStore Toolbox must be able to SSH to each host in the cluster. When singlestoredb-server is installed via an RPM or Debian package when deploying SingleStore, a memsql user and group are also created on each host in the cluster.

This memsql user does not have a shell, and attempting to log in or SSH as this user will fail. The user that deploys SingleStore is added to the memsql group. This group allows most Toolbox commands to run without sudo privileges, and members of this group can perform many Toolbox operations without the need to escalate to sudo. Users who desire to run SingleStore Toolbox commands must be added to the memsql group on each host in the cluster. They must also be able to SSH to each host.

Manually creating a memsql user and group is only recommended in a sudo-less environment when performing a tarball-based deployment of SingleStore. In order to run SingleStore Toolbox commands against a cluster, this manually-created memsql user must be configured so that it can SSH to each host in the cluster.

Minimal Deployment

SingleStore has been designed to be deployed with at least two nodes:

  • A Master Aggregator node that runs SQL queries and aggregates the results, and

  • A single leaf node, which is responsible for storing and processing data

These two nodes can be deployed on a single host (via the cluster-in-box option), or on two hosts, with one SingleStore node on each host.

While additional aggregators and nodes can be added and removed as required, a minimal deployment of SingleStore always consists of at least these two nodes.

CLI Online Deployment

You can deploy SingleStore onto each host from the main deployment host and create the SingleStore nodes for your cluster.

From the main deployment host, deploy the SingleStore on all of your hosts using the setup-cluster command. Hosts are specified via the --master-host, --aggregator-hosts, and --leaf-hosts flags as comma-separated host names. The --password flag specifies the password for the root database user.

Other than the main deployment host being specified as the --master-host, the other hosts in your cluster can be used as hosts for the child aggregator or leaf nodes.

sdb-deploy setup-cluster -i /path/to/yourSSHkey \
--license <license> \
--master-host <main_IP_address_or_hostname> \
--aggregator-hosts <child_agg_IP_address_or_hostname> \
--leaf-hosts <leaf1_IP_address_or_hostname>,<leaf2_IP_address_or_hostname> \
--password <secure_password> \
--version 8.7

For large clusters with many hosts, it may be inconvenient to have to input all the host names in the command line. In place of the individual flags, you may instead use a cluster file. See the Cluster File Deployment for more information.

Note: If your license is not shown in the code block above, you can retrieve it from the Cloud Portal.

Note

If your host does not have the which command available, you will need to specify the package through the --force-package-format {rpm | deb} flag when running the setup-cluster command.

The setup-cluster command does several things for you:

  • Installs the latest singlestoredb-server package on all hosts in your cluster.

  • Deploys SingleStore engine across all of the hosts in your cluster.

  • Creates the master aggregator. In this tutorial, the master aggregator resides on the main deployment host.

  • Creates any child aggregators specified in either the host file or in the command-line.

  • Creates leaf nodes for your cluster. Note: The setup-cluster command only creates one node per host. If your host is NUMA capable and has more than one NUMA node, you can install additional leaf nodes.

  • By default, the setup-cluster command will also enable High Availability. To disable High Availability, use the flag --high-availability=false in the setup-cluster command.

After you have deployed your cluster, run sdb-admin optimize. This command checks your current cluster configuration against a set of best practices and either makes changes to maximize performance or provides recommendations for you. For hosts with NUMA support, this command will bind the leaf nodes to specific NUMA nodes.

sdb-admin optimize

If you encounter errors running either of these commands, verify that your deployment environment satisfies the following conditions:

  • You can SSH to every host in the cluster using the IPs or hostnames specified in the setup-cluster step above.

  • Your deployment user has root or sudo privileges in order to install packages on all hosts:

    sudo apt-get install ...
  • Port 3306 on all hosts is open to all other hosts in the cluster.

Additional Deployment Options

Note

If this deployment method is not ideal for your target environment, you can choose one that fits your requirements from the Deployment Options.

Connect to Your Cluster

The singlestore-client package contains is a lightweight client application that allows you to run SQL queries against your database from a terminal window.

After you have installed singlestore-client, use the singlestore application as you would use the mysql client to access your database.

For more connection options, help is available through singlestore --help.

singlestore -h <Master-or-Child-Aggregator-host-IP-address> -P <port> -u <user> -p<secure-password>
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 12
Server version: 5.5.58 MemSQL source distribution (compatible; MySQL Enterprise & MySQL Commercial)

Copyright (c) 2000, 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

singlestore> 

Refer to Connect to SingleStore for additional options for connecting to SingleStore.

Next Steps After Deployment

Now that you have installed SingleStore, check out the following resources to learn more about SingleStore:

  • Optimizing Table Data Structures: Learn the difference between rowstore and columnstore tables, when you should pick one over the other, how to pick a shard key, and so on.

  • How to Load Data into SingleStore: Describes the different options you have when ingesting data into a SingleStore cluster.

  • How to Run Queries: Provides example schema and queries to begin exploring the potential of SingleStore.

  • Configure Monitoring: SingleStore’s native monitoring solution is designed to capture and reveal cluster events over time. By analyzing this event data, you can identify trends and, if necessary, take action to remediate issues.

  • Tools Reference: Contains information about SingleStore Tools, including Toolbox and related commands.

Last modified: September 18, 2023

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