MySQL 5.6 was made generally available as a production-ready solution earlier this month. This release comes about 2 years after MySQL 5.5 was released, but MySQL 5.6 contains improvements started long before that – for example, work on the Innodb Full Text Search project was started over 6 years ago, in addition with many optimizer [...]
CentOS 5.8 users: your UTF-8 data is in peril with Perl MySQL
CentOS 5.8 and earlier use Perl module DBD::mysql v3.0007 which has a bug that causes Perl not to flag UTF-8 data as being UTF-8. Presuming that the MySQL table/column is using UTF-8, and the Perl MySQL connection is also using UTF-8, then a correct system returns: PV = 0x9573840 "\343\203\213 \303\250"\0 [UTF8 "\x{30cb} \x{e8}"] That’s a Devel::Peek inside a Perl scalar variable which [...]
Solving RPM installation conflicts in CentOS 5 and CentOS 6
Lately we’ve had many reports of the RPM packages for CentOS 5 (mostly) and CentOS 6 having issues when installing different combinations of our products, particularly with Percona Toolkit for MySQL. Examples of bugs related to these issues are lp:1031427 and lp:1051874. These problems arise when trying to install a package from the distribution that [...]
Analyzing Slow Query Table in MySQL 5.6
Next week I’m teaching an online Percona Training class, called Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit. This is a guided tour of best practices for pt-query-digest, the best tool for evaluating where your database response time is being spent. This month we saw the GA release of MySQL 5.6, and I wanted to check if any [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 is ready
About a month ago, we held a bug raffle for Percona Toolkit 2.1.9. The turnout was good and the resulting release is worth upgrading to, especially if you were affected by the backwards-incompatible changes to pt-heartbeat in 2.1.8. Here are the release notes for Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 which highlight the bugs fixed: Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 has been released. [...]
How to create/restore a slave using GTID replication in MySQL 5.6
MySQL 5.6 is GA! Now we have new things to play with and in my personal opinion the most interesting one is the new Global Transaction ID (GTID) support in replication. This post is not an explanation of what is GTID and how it works internally because there are many documents about that: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/replication-gtids-concepts.html One [...]
How Can Percona MySQL Server Development Services Help ?
At Percona we offer a number of services. One of them, Custom MySQL Server Development, is commonly the most misunderstood and undervalued. There are a lot of ways Percona custom MySQL server development can help your business be more successful with MySQL. Here are some ways: Bugs – There are Bugs in MySQL, Percona Server, [...]
Read/Write Splitting with PHP Webinar Questions Followup
Today I gave a presentation on “Read/Write Splitting with PHP” for Percona Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as I could during the session, but here are [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 bug raffle
Since we’re very busy working on Percona Toolkit 2.2 and other projects, I thought 2.1.8 (the current latest Percona Toolkit release) would be the last release in that series, but it introduced a new bug in pt-heartbeat (despite all the tool’s tests) that I’d like to fix. A single bug fix is probably underkill for a [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 released today with beta support for MySQL 5.6
Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 was released today and the new version comes with some pretty cool news: Beta support for MySQL 5.6 (which as you might know is also in beta). In addition to various bug fixes, Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 also offers beta support for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC). Version 2.1.8 continues the trend of solid [...]

