One of our Remote DBA service clients recently had an issue with size on disk for a particular table; in short this table was some 25 million rows of application audit data with an on disk size of 345GB recorded solely for the purposes of debugging which may or may not occur. Faced with the task of [...]
Secure passwords being insecure
May 27, 2012 By 6 Comments
If you follow the general advices to create secure password the following ones seem to be secure, right? s11P$||!sh&2 pr0&!!ke0 3kj39|!381 The answer to the question is, “it depends on how you use them” Notice that these passwords all contain multiple exclamation points and ampersands which are normally special characters for your shell. The people [...]
Announcing Percona Toolkit Release 2.0.3
February 6, 2012 By 2 Comments
We’ve released Percona Toolkit 2.0.3, with a couple of major improvements and many minor ones. You can download it, read the documentation, and get support for it. What’s new? You can read the changelog for the details, but here are the highlights: Brand new pt-diskstats, thanks to Brian Fraser. This tool is completely rewritten, and [...]
A recovery trivia or how to recover from a lost ibdata1 file
June 3, 2011 By 8 Comments
A few day ago, a customer came to Percona needing to recover data. Basically, while doing a transfer from one SAN to another, something went wrong and they lost the ibdata1 file, where all the table meta-data is stored. Fortunately, they were running with innodb_file_per_table so the data itself was available. What they could provide [...]
Distributed set processing performance analysis with ICE 3.5.2pl1 at 20 nodes.
May 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Demonstrating distributed set processing performance Shard-Query + ICE scales very well up to at least 20 nodes This post is a detailed performance analysis of what I’ve coined “distributed set processing”. Please also read this post’s “sister post” which describes the distributed set processing technique. Also, remember that Percona can help you get up and [...]
Shard-Query EC2 images available
May 11, 2011 By 2 Comments
Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]
How to use tcpdump on very busy hosts
April 18, 2011 By 17 Comments
Often I run into problems when trying to use mk-query-digest with tcpdump on “very” busy hosts. You might be thinking, “very busy is a relative and unquantifiable term,” and you’d be right, so I’ll phrase this differently. Let me give a little background to the problem first. Mk-query-digest tries to handle dropped or missing packets [...]
Using Flexviews – part two, change data capture
March 25, 2011 By 26 Comments
In my previous post I introduced materialized view concepts. This post begins with an introduction to change data capture technology and describes some of the ways in which it can be leveraged for your benefit. This is followed by a description of FlexCDC, the change data capture tool included with Flexviews. It continues with an [...]
How to debug long-running transactions in MySQL
March 8, 2011 By 6 Comments
Among the many things that can cause a “server stall” is a long-running transaction. If a transaction remains open for a very long time without committing, and has modified data, then other transactions could block and fail with a lock wait timeout. The problem is, it can be very difficult to find the offending code [...]
Impact of the sort buffer size in MySQL
October 25, 2010 By 8 Comments
The parameter sort_buffer_size is one the MySQL parameters that is far from obvious to adjust. It is a per session buffer that is allocated every time it is needed. The problem with the sort buffer comes from the way Linux allocates memory. Monty Taylor (here) have described the underlying issue in detail, but basically above [...]
