It is no secret that bugs related to multithreading–deadlocks, data races, starvations etc–have a big impact on application’s stability and are at the same time hard to find due to their nondeterministic nature. Any tool that makes finding such bugs easier, preferably before anybody is aware of their existence, is very welcome.
Helgrinding MySQL with InnoDB for Synchronisation Errors, Fun and Profit
Bug#12704861
As Mark pointed out, there isn’t a lot of detail in the release notes about what could potentially be a very serious problem that is fixed in MySQL 5.1.60. I’ll repeat here the full documentation from the release notes: “InnoDB Storage Engine: Data from BLOB columns could be lost if the server crashed at a precise [...]
Make your file system error resilient
One of the typical problems I see setting up ext2/3/4 file system is sticking to defaults when it comes to behavior on errors. By default these filesystems are configured to Continue when error (such as IO error or meta data inconsistency) is discovered which can continue spreading corruption. This manifests itself in a worst way [...]
A recovery trivia or how to recover from a lost ibdata1 file
A few day ago, a customer came to Percona needing to recover data. Basically, while doing a transfer from one SAN to another, something went wrong and they lost the ibdata1 file, where all the table meta-data is stored. Fortunately, they were running with innodb_file_per_table so the data itself was available. What they could provide [...]
Modeling MySQL Capacity by Measuring Resource Consumptions
There are many angles you can look at the system to predict in performance, the model baron has published for example is good for measuring scalability of the system as concurrency growths. In many cases however we’re facing a need to answer a question how much load a given system can handle when load is [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]
Spreading .ibd files across multiple disks; the optimization that isn’t
Inspired by Baron’s earlier post, here is one I hear quite frequently – “If you enable innodb_file_per_table, each table is it’s own .ibd file. You can then relocate the heavy hit tables to a different location and create symlinks to the original location.” There are a few things wrong with this advice:
Using XtraBackup on NFS for MySQL backups
XtraBackup works great for backing MySQL up to an NFS volume, but there is a gotcha that you need to be aware of. This applies to anything you do with NFS, not just XtraBackup. The gotcha is that NFS uses client-side caching to reduce overhead of sending data across the network.
Data Corruption, DRBD and story of bug
Working with customer, I faced pretty nasty bug, which is actually not rare situation , but in this particular there are some lessons I would like to share. The case is pretty much described in bug 55981, or in pastebin. Everything below is related to InnoDB-plugin/XtraDB, but not to regular InnoDB ( i.e in MySQL [...]
Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep
Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]

