How do we install mariadb/oracle database for on premise installation ?

[hall_aaron]

How do we install mariadb/oracle database for on premise installation ?  we have used KB0563731,KB0565425, KB0563728) Any bulletins or knowledge document or instructions will be help us. Thanks

[Radim Tichy]

Hello Aaron,

my recommendation to you is to follow instructions available under HI portal in Knowledge section.

Specificly check "Planning guide" and "Implementation guide".

For customers with on-premise solutions there is also section for downloading needed installation packages, links, recommendations.

Strictly follow instructions inside these documents.

About MariaDB installation there is nothing special to be done just to install supported version (currently 10.1 and 10.2) on your DB server or optionally mysql 5.6.38 and use recommended configuration my.cnf provided by ServiceNow - also available on HI portal.

Slightly modify this config file to follow your specific need and available HW configuration (file paths, innodb configuration based on your available RAM...etc)

Alternatively contact ServiceNow Professional Services and ask for help there with initial configuration.

Based on your budget and purpose of this instance installation also connection to someone who has already experience with on-premise planning and implementation will be benefit for you to avoid deadlocking and wheel invention.

Kind regards

Radim

[Jan Sierens1]

The releases you refer to are quite old the end of support for MySQL 5.6.38 is Feb 2021, for MariaDB 10.2 is May 2022.

(I currently have an issue accessing hi.)

Are more recent versions supported?

ServiceNow themselves moved from MySQL to MariaDB. Is MariaDB recommended?

Is running against MariaDB Galera Cluster supported?

Best regards,
Jan

https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-server/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL

[Ulrich]

Hi,

I work for MySQL and MariaDB customers (Enterprise or Community edition for both) since many years and I met the people form ServiceNow at the MariaDB User Conference and I would say it is recommended to use MariaDB and yes ServiceNow runs on MariaDB Galera Cluster using either MaxScale (for paying MariaDB Enterprise customers) or ProxySQL (open source) database proxy. Using MaxScale on top of MariaDB Galera Cluster is as far as I know the way ServiceNow reaches it 99.996% availability for their cloud offering.

[Radim Tichy]

Hello Jan,

You are right, mentioned MySQL 5.6.38 is really now a bit outdated, but this is the latest MySQL release which has been fully tested in real production. Any additional -even minor- upgrade has been identified as not working with ServiceNow instance.

Currently official statement say that ServiceNow support MariaDB 10.1 and 10.2.

That is it.

Any other version or more latest release should be implemented on your own decision with potential risk to not receive needed support from vendor side due to not followed recommendations.

By default ServiceNow recommends to utilize master/slave configuration for database replication.

In case you would like to implement somehow "auto AHA" features on your own DC it is highly recommended to implement master/master replication, but still with active connection from the application to the one DB only to prevent issues and delays syncing when multi-master setup or any "cluster" setup is in use.

Especially when really big and highly utilized instances are used ServiceNow is very sensitive to SQL statement execution time. Every transaction contains many (hundreds, thousands) atomized SQL statements, where even extremely small performance degradation due to "cluster" sync reasons could lead to bad user experience.

I would rather go for master-master setup.

In case you would like to used additional DBs due to performance reason (read-replica) or security reasons (external tool DB read) additional slave node could be connected to its geographically nearly configured master nodes.

Kind regards

Radim