Many of you heard of this nasty security vulnerability in MySQL, and as we are getting a lot of inquiries how does it affect Percona Server, I decided to address it in this post. The issue exists in the source code of MySQL 5.5.23 or earlier and MySQL 5.1.62 or earlier. The same is true [...]
NO Security vulnerability in Percona Server / XtraDB Cluster provided binaries
Migrating to XtraDB Cluster Webinar follow up questions
Thanks to all who attended my webinar today. The session was recorded and will be available to watch for free soon here. There were a lot of great questions asked during the session, so I’d like to take this opportunity to try to answer a few of them: Q: Is there an easy way to [...]
Faster Point In Time Recovery with LVM2 Snaphots and Binary Logs
LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages
This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship. Some basic facts Most of us know that writing into Innodb updates buffer [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Upgrade Performance Regressions
So lets say you upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to Percona Server 5.5 and instead of expected performance improvement you see your performance being worse. What should you do ? First if you followed MySQL upgrade best practices such as testing your workload with pt-upgrade the chances of this happening are rather slim. But lets assume [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.0.1 and 1.0.2 released
I’m happy to announce that we’ve released Percona Toolkit 2.0.1, a major new version of our essential DBA toolkit, as well as a minor bugfix update to the old 1.0.x series. You can download it from the project homepage, or install it through our RPM and DEB repositories. Documentation is online (and the 1.0 docs [...]
How To Test Your Upgrades – pt-upgrade
Upgrades are usually one of the biggest part of any database infrastructure maintenance. Even with enough planning something else can go bad after sending your production application to the version you’ve upgraded to. Let’s look at how one Percona Toolkit tool, pt-upgrade can help you identify what to expect and test your upgrades better which [...]
Setting up XFS on Hardware RAID — the simple edition
There are about a gazillion FAQs and HOWTOs out there that talk about XFS configuration, RAID IO alignment, and mount point options. I wanted to try to put some of that information together in a condensed and simplified format that will work for the majority of use cases. This is not meant to cover every [...]
Which Linux distribution for a MySQL database server? A specific point of view.
One of the more common questions I get asked is which Linux distribution I would use for a MySQL database server. Bearing the responsibility for someone else’s success means I should advise something that is stable, reliable, easy to manage and has plenty of resources available online. It should also allow running MySQL without too [...]
MySQL Life Cycle. Your Feedback is needed.
When I started with MySQL 3.22 I would start running MySQL from early beta (if not alpha) and update MySQL the same date as release would hit the web. Since that time I matured and so did MySQL ecosystem. MySQL is powering a lot more demanding and business critical applications now than 12 years ago [...]

