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 [...]
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 does MySQL Replication really work?
While we do have many blog posts on replication on our blog, such as on replication being single-threaded, on semi-synchronous replication or on estimating replication capacity, I don’t think we have one that covers the very basics of how MySQL replication really works on the high level. Or it’s been so long ago I can’t [...]
Announcing Percona XtraBackup 1.6.7
Percona is glad to announce the latest stable release of Percona XtraBackup 1.6.7 on December 20th, 2012 (Downloads are available here). This release is purely composed of bug fixes to the previous stable release of Percona XtraBackup. New users should head for Percona XtraBackup 2.0 rather than 1.6. Bugs Fixed: xtrabackup_binary was not included in tar [...]
read_buffer_size can break your replication
There are some variables that can affect the replication behavior and sometimes cause some big troubles. In this post I’m going to talk about read_buffer_size and how this variable together with max_allowed_packet can break your replication. The setup is a master-master replication with the following values: max_allowed_packet = 32M read_buffer_size = 100M To break the [...]
Using Flexviews – part two, change data capture
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 [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 1: Single-Threaded Replication
I recently mentioned a few of the big “non-starter” limitations Postgres has overcome for specific use cases. I decided to write a series of blog posts on MySQL’s unsolved severe limitations. I mean limitations that really hobble it for major, important needs — not in areas where it isn’t used, but in areas where it [...]
Storing MySQL Binary logs on NFS Volume
There is a lot of discussions whenever running MySQL storing data on NFS is a good idea. There is a lot of things for and against this and this post is not about them. The fact is number of people run their databases on NetApp and other forms of NFS storage and this post is [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
Filtered MySQL Replication
To get this straight – I’m not a big fan of filtered or partial MySQL Replication (as of version MySQL 5.0) – there is enough gotchas with replication itself and getting things right with filtering can get quite bumpy road. In some applications however it is very helpful so lets see what one should do [...]

