May 25, 2013

High-load problems? Investigate them with ‘pt-query-digest’

I had the chance to work on an interesting case last week, and I thought I’d share what I think is a little known goodie from Percona Toolkit for MySQL called pt-query-digest. One customer was suffering from periods of high load on their database server, leading to degraded application performance, and sometimes even short moments [...]

The write cache: Swap insanity tome III

Swapping has always been something bad for MySQL performance but it is even more important for HA systems. It is so important to avoid swapping with HA that NDB cluster basically forbids calling malloc after the startup phase and hence its rather complex configuration. Probably most readers of this blog know (or should know) about [...]

Is your MySQL buffer pool warm? Make it sweat!

Today’s blog post diving into the waters of the MySQL buffer pool is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog, and is Part 1 of 2. Thank you to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon for contributing to this project and post. We’ll be posting Part 2 on Thursday. I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and [...]

Facebook at Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo and Advanced Registration Ending Soon

Facebook is a major user of MySQL and has pushed the performance limits of the technology. Their MySQL experts have deep, hands on knowledge of the technology. I’m pleased to welcome Mark Callaghan, Software Engineer for Database Infrastructure at Facebook, back again this year to the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo to share his [...]

SimCity outages, traffic control and Thread Pool for MySQL

For this post I’m going to shamelessly exploit the litany of technical problems SimCity players encountered earlier this month and a few examples of how Thread Pool for MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL can help to prevent such incidents. Users of SimCity, a city-building and urban planning simulation video game, encountered network outages, issues with [...]

MySQL Backup tools used by Percona Remote DBA for MySQL

As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic [...]

Percona Server on the Nexus 7: Your own MySQL Database Server on an Android Tablet

Following Roel’s post, Percona Server on the Raspberry Pi: Your own MySQL Database Server , I thought what other crazy gadget can I run Percona Server on? And having an Asus Nexus 7 Android tablet I decided to give it a try. Anything below contains a risk that you break your tablet if you do [...]

Replication checksums in MySQL 5.6

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 [...]

Can’t Create Thread: Errno 11 (A Tale of Two Ulimits)

Recently some of my fellow Perconians and I have noticed a bit of an uptick in customer cases featuring the following error message:

The canonical solution to this issue, if you do a bit of Googling, is to increase the number of processes / threads available to the MySQL user, typically by adding a [...]