May 25, 2013

Finally. How to verify if all MySQL records were recovered

After nearly every recovery case the same question arises: How many MySQL records were recovered and how many were lost. Until now there was no way to answer the question without manual investigation. As it turned out a small change can make a big difference. There are two ways to know how many records an [...]

Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 is ready

About a month ago, we held a bug raffle for Percona Toolkit 2.1.9.  The turnout was good and the resulting release is worth upgrading to, especially if you were affected by the backwards-incompatible changes to pt-heartbeat in 2.1.8.  Here are the release notes for Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 which highlight the bugs fixed: Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 has been released. [...]

Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do

pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex.  Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities.  Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs.  The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]

Edge-case behavior of INSERT…ODKU

A few weeks back, I was working on a customer issue wherein they were observing database performance that dropped through the floor (to the point of an outage) roughly every 4 weeks or so. Nothing special about the environment, the hardware, or the queries; really, the majority of the database was a single table with [...]

When is MIN(DATE) != MIN(DATE) ?

Inspiration for this post is courtesy of a friend and former colleague of mine, Greg Youngblood, who pinged me last week with an interesting MySQL puzzle. He was running Percona Server 5.5.21 with a table structure that looks something like this:

When he ran this query:

The result came back as 2012-06-22 10:28:16. [...]

Announcing Percona Server 5.6 Alpha

We are very happy to announce our first alpha of Percona Server 5.6. Based on MySQL 5.6.5 and all the improvements contained within, this is the first step towards a full Percona Server 5.6 release. Binaries are available to download from our downloads site here: http://www.percona.com/downloads/Percona-Server-5.6/Percona-Server-5.6.5-alpha60.0/ We will post binaries to our EXPERIMENTAL repositories later, we’re [...]

Percona XtraDB Cluster: Failure Scenarios with only 2 nodes

During the design period of a new cluster, it is always advised to have at least 3 nodes (this is the case with PXC but it’s also the same with PRM). But why and what are the risks ? The goal of having more than 2 nodes, in fact an odd number is recommended in [...]

pt-online-schema-change and default values

When I’m doing conventional ALTER TABLE in MySQL I can ignore default value and it will be assigned based on the column type. For example this alter table sbtest add column v varchar(100) not null would work even though we do not specify default value. MySQL will assign empty string as default default value for [...]

Improved InnoDB fast index creation

One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER TABLE [...]

Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0 on October 15, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.59, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all the [...]