May 25, 2013

Announcing Percona Server for MySQL version 5.5.29-30.0

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server for MySQL version 5.5.29-30.0 on February 26th, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.29, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.29-30.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

Comparing Percona XtraDB Cluster with Semi-Sync replication Cross-WAN

I have a customer who is considering Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a two colo WAN environment.  They wanted me to do a test comparing PXC against semi-synchronous replication to see how they stack up against each other. Test Environment The test environment included AWS EC2 nodes in US-East and US-West (Oregon).  The ping RTT latency [...]

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 [...]

Percona Server 5.5.16-22.0

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.16-22.0 on October 14, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.16, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.16-22.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all the [...]

Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views

Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]