May 21, 2012

Win Free MySQL Conference Tickets!

We’re giving away three full conference passes (worth $995 each) to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, and you can win one simply by sharing the conference with your friends and colleagues! Second prize is one of ten copies of the new High Performance MySQL, 3rd Edition (worth $55 each), the recently released update [...]

Give feedback on a pt-online-schema-change update

I am writing a specification for updating pt-online-schema-change. The outline of the changes I want to make is here: http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/ptdev:blueprints:redesign-pt-online-schema-change The idea is to make the tool Do The Right Thing, with features such as automatically throttling its operation to avoid causing replicas to lag. Many of the features and improvements are similar to those [...]

A Book-Signing Opportunity for Technical Authors

Have you authored a technical book that’s relevant to MySQL users? Want to get great visibility for yourself and your book? We’re planning a book-signing session for the upcoming MySQL conference, and you can participate in it. In brief, we’ll provide a table for you, and you’ll then be able to promote yourself, i.e. post [...]

Percona Toolkit 2.0.4 released

Percona Toolkit version 2.0.4 is available for immediate download. This release fixes 25 bugs and is a bug-fix release only, with the exception of a minor new filtering option for pt-kill. The change log is available on Launchpad. There are links to the documentation, downloads, bug reporting system, and mailing list on the toolkit homepage. [...]

MariaDB 5.3 is released as GA!

Congratulations to Monty Program and the many community contributors for releasing the GA version of MariaDB 5.3. We were in our annual all-staff meeting last week, so we are a little slow to blog about this and acknowledge the great work that has gone into MariaDB. Better late than never, I hope. Before I discuss [...]

Black-Box MySQL Performance Analysis with TCP Traffic

For about the past year I’ve been formulating a series of tools and practices that can provide deep insight into system performance simply by looking at TCP packet headers, and when they arrive and depart from a system. This works for MySQL as well as a lot of other types of systems, because it doesn’t [...]

How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins

In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]

How to convert MySQL’s SHOW PROFILES into a real profile

SHOW PROFILES shows how much time MySQL spends in various phases of query execution, but it isn’t a full-featured profile. By that, I mean that it doesn’t show similar phases aggregated together, doesn’t sort them by worst-first, and doesn’t show the relative amount of time consumed. I’ll profile the “nicer_but_slower_film_list” included with the Sakila sample [...]

Why don’t our new Nagios plugins use caching?

In response to the release of our new MySQL monitoring plugins on Friday, one commenter asked why the new Nagios plugins don’t use caching. It’s worth answering in a post rather than a comment, because there is an important principle that needs to be understood to monitor servers correctly. But first, some history. When I [...]

Announcing MySQL Monitoring Plugins from Percona

We’ve released a new set of monitoring plugins for MySQL servers and related software. With these plugins, you can set up world-class graphing and monitoring for your MySQL servers, using your own on-premises Cacti and Nagios software. The Cacti plugins are derived from an existing set of templates we’ve been using for several years, but [...]