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 [...]
How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins
February 22, 2012 By 9 Comments
In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]
Hijacking Innodb Foreign Keys
January 2, 2012 By 2 Comments
I guess I’m first to post in 2012 so Happy New Year all blog readers ! Now back to HardCore MySQL business – foreign Keys. MySQL supported Foreign Keys for Innodb for many years, yet rudimentary support initially added in MySQL 3.23.44 have not been improved in new releases as much as I’d like. We [...]
How to change innodb_log_file_size safely
July 9, 2011 By 15 Comments
If you need to change MySQL’s innodb_log_file_size parameter (see How to calculate a good InnoDB log file size), you can’t just change the parameter in the my.cnf file and restart the server. If you do, InnoDB will refuse to start because the existing log files don’t match the configured size. You need to shut the [...]
ACTIVE with Locks – Now thats a problem !
June 2, 2011 By 2 Comments
One of item I always look at SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS to see if there are any transactions spending very long time in ACTIVE state. In the perfect world if you’re running online system you should not see transactions spending more than couple of seconds in ACTIVE state. Especially ACTIVE transactions which do not currently [...]
Scaling problems still exist in MySQL 5.5 and Percona Server 5.5
May 20, 2011 By 11 Comments
MySQL 5.5 and Percona Server 5.5 do not solve all scalability problems even for read only workloads. Workloads which got a lot of attention such as Sysbench and DBT2/TPC-C scale pretty well a they got a lot of attention, there can be other quite typical workloads however which do not scale that well. This is [...]
InnoDB Flushing: Theory and solutions
April 4, 2011 By 23 Comments
I mentioned problems with InnoDB flushing in a previous post. Before getting to ideas on a solution, let’s define some terms and take a look into theory. The two most important parameters for InnoDB performance are innodb_buffer_pool_size and innodb_log_file_size. InnoDB works with data in memory, and all changes to data are performed in memory. In [...]
Using Flexviews – part two, change data capture
March 25, 2011 By 26 Comments
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 [...]
Moving Subtrees in Closure Table Hierarchies
February 14, 2011 By 18 Comments
Many software developers find they need to store hierarchical data, such as threaded comments, personnel org charts, or nested bill-of-materials. Sometimes it’s tricky to do this in SQL and still run efficient queries against the data. I’ll be presenting a webinar for Percona on February 28 at 9am PST. I’ll describe several solutions for storing [...]
Innodb undo segment size and transaction isolation
January 12, 2011 By 3 Comments
You might know if you have long running transactions you’re risking having a lot of “garbage” accumulated in undo segment size which can cause performance degradation as well as increased disk space usage. Long transactions can also be bad for other reasons such as taking row level locks which will prevent other transactions for execution, [...]
