I recently had to do some customer work involving the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin and would like to share my experience in this post. Auditing user activity in MySQL has traditionally been challenging. Most data can be obtained from the slow or general log, but this involves a lot of data you don’t need too, and [...]
Finally. How to verify if all MySQL records were recovered
April 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment
After nearly every recovery case the same question arises: How many MySQL records were recovered and how many were lost. Until now there was no way to answer the question without manual investigation. As it turned out a small change can make a big difference. There are two ways to know how many records an [...]
Investigating MySQL Replication Latency in Percona XtraDB Cluster
March 3, 2013 By 13 Comments
I was curious to check how Percona XtraDB Cluster behaves when it comes to MySQL replication latency — or better yet, call it data propagation latency. It was interesting to see whenever I can get stale data reads from other cluster nodes after write performed to some specific node. To test it I wrote quite a [...]
Replication checksums in MySQL 5.6
February 15, 2013 By 3 Comments
MySQL 5.6 has an impressive list of improvements. Among them, replication checksums caught my attention as it seems that many people misunderstand the real added value of this new feature. I heard people think that with replication checksums, data integrity between the master and its replicas is now enforced. As we’ll see, it’s not that [...]
Measuring the amount of writes in InnoDB redo logs
October 8, 2012 By 4 Comments
Choosing a good InnoDB log file size is key to InnoDB write performance. This can be done by measuring the amount of writes in the redo logs. You can find a detailed explanation in this post. To sum up, here are the main points: The redo logs should be large enough to store at most [...]
Timezone and pt-table-checksum
September 25, 2012 By 1 Comment
I recently worked through an issue with a client trying to detect data drift across some servers that were located in different timezones. Unfortunately, several of the tables had timestamp fields and were set to a default value of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. From the manual, here is how MySQL handles timezone locality with timestamp fields: Values for TIMESTAMP columns are [...]
A (prototype) lower impact slow query log
September 20, 2012 By 12 Comments
Yesterday, over at my personal blog, I blogged about the impact of the MySQL slow query log. Since we’re working on Percona Server 5.6, I did wonder if this was a good opportunity to re-examine how we could provide slow query log type functionality to our users. The slow query log code inside the MySQL [...]
A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins
May 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment
MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.0.1 and 1.0.2 released
January 3, 2012 By 5 Comments
I’m happy to announce that we’ve released Percona Toolkit 2.0.1, a major new version of our essential DBA toolkit, as well as a minor bugfix update to the old 1.0.x series. You can download it from the project homepage, or install it through our RPM and DEB repositories. Documentation is online (and the 1.0 docs [...]
Emulating global transaction ID with pt-heartbeat
November 4, 2011 By 6 Comments
Global transaction IDs are being considered for a future version of MySQL. A global transaction ID lets you determine a server’s replication position reliably, among other benefits. This is great when you need to switch a replica to another master, or any number of other needs. Sometimes you can’t wait for the real thing, but [...]
