Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these [...]
Distro Packages, Pre-built Binaries or Compile Your Own MySQL
I’ve been helping customers deploy and maintain MySQL (and variants) for the last couple of years and it has always been interesting to hear customer thoughts on how they want their servers installed. It has also been asked many times not only by our support and consulting customers, but widely from different forums and blogs [...]
Faster Point In Time Recovery with LVM2 Snaphots and Binary Logs
LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
STOP: DELETE IGNORE on Tables with Foreign Keys Can Break Replication
DELETE IGNORE suppresses errors and downgrades them as warnings, if you are not aware how IGNORE behaves on tables with FOREIGN KEYs, you could be in for a surprise. Let’s take a table with data as example, column c1 on table t2 references column c1 on table t1 – both columns have identical set of rows for [...]
How To Test Your Upgrades – pt-upgrade
Upgrades are usually one of the biggest part of any database infrastructure maintenance. Even with enough planning something else can go bad after sending your production application to the version you’ve upgraded to. Let’s look at how one Percona Toolkit tool, pt-upgrade can help you identify what to expect and test your upgrades better which [...]
When Does InnoDB Update Table Statistics? (And When It Can Bite)
An InnoDB table statistics is used for JOIN optimizations and helping the MySQL optimizer choose the appropriate index for a query. If a table’s statistics or index cardinality becomes outdated, you might see queries which previously performed well suddenly show up on slow query log until InnoDB again updates the statistics. But when does InnoDB [...]
SELECT UNION Results INTO OUTFILE
Here’s a quick tip I know some of us has overlooked at some point. When doing SELECT … UNION SELECT, where do you put the the INTO OUTFILE clause? On the first SELECT, on the last or somewhere else? The manual has the answer here, to quote: Only the last SELECT statement can use INTO [...]

