I presented a webinar today about SQL Injection, to try to clear up some of the misconceptions that many other blogs and articles have about this security risk. You can register for the webinar even now that I’ve presented it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording, which will be available soon. During [...]
DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL
Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
Can we improve MySQL variable handling ?
MySQL Settings (also known as Server Variables) have interesting property. When you set variable in running server this change is not persisted in any way and server will be back to old value upon restart. MySQL also does not have option to re-read config file without restarting as some other software so approach to change [...]
Identifying the load with the help of pt-query-digest and Percona Server
Overview Profiling, analyzing and then fixing queries is likely the most oft-repeated part of a job of a DBA and one that keeps evolving, as new features are added to the application new queries pop up that need to be analyzed and fixed. And there are not too many tools out there that can make [...]
Innodb vs MySQL index counts
I had a customer recently who a few strange errors in their mysqld.err log:
1 | [ERROR] Table database_name/table_name contains 8 indexes inside InnoDB, which is different from the number of indexes 7 defined in the MySQL |
This customer was running Percona Server 5.1 and they got this error on two tables during a maintenance window when they were adding indexes to the same tables. We had a suspicion that it had something to do with Fast [...]
Helgrinding MySQL with InnoDB for Synchronisation Errors, Fun and Profit
It is no secret that bugs related to multithreading–deadlocks, data races, starvations etc–have a big impact on application’s stability and are at the same time hard to find due to their nondeterministic nature. Any tool that makes finding such bugs easier, preferably before anybody is aware of their existence, is very welcome.
Review of Virident FlashMAX MLC cards
I have been following Virident for a long time (e.g. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/06/15/virident-tachion-new-player-on-flash-pci-e-cards-market/). They have great PCIe Flash cards based on SLC NAND. I always thought that Virident needed to come up with an MLC card, and I am happy to see they have finally done so. At Virident’s request, I performed an evaluation of their MLC [...]
Recovering Linux software RAID, RAID5 Array
Dealing with MySQL you might need to deal with RAID recovery every so often. Sometimes because of client lacking the proper backup or sometimes because recovering RAID might improve recovery, for example you might get point in time recovery while backup setup only takes you to the point where last binary log was backed up. [...]
Getting MySQL Core file on Linux
Core file can be quite helpful to troubleshoot MySQL Crashes yet it is not always easy to get, especially with recent Linux distributions which have security features to prevent core files to be dumped by setuid processes (and MySQL Server is most commonly ran changing user from “root” to “mysql”). Before you embark on enabling [...]

