Many backup tools including Percona Xtrabackup, MyLVMBackup and others use FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK to temporary make MySQL read only. In many cases the period for which server has to be made read only is very short, just few seconds, yet the impact of FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK can be quite large because [...]
Best kept MySQLDump Secret
March 23, 2012 By 13 Comments
Many people use mysqldump –single-transaction to get consistent backup for their Innodb tables without making database read only. In most cases it works, but did you know there are some cases when you can get table entirely missing from the backup if you use this technique ? The problem comes from the fact how MySQL’s [...]
Faster Point In Time Recovery with LVM2 Snaphots and Binary Logs
February 23, 2012 By 3 Comments
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 11 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 [...]
Recovering Linux software RAID, RAID5 Array
August 27, 2011 By 2 Comments
Dealing with MySQL you might need to deal with RAID recovery every so often. Sometimes because of client lacking the proper backup or sometimes because recovering RAID might improve recovery, for example you might get point in time recovery while backup setup only takes you to the point where last binary log was backed up. [...]
MySQL performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS
August 4, 2011 By 11 Comments
A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts [...]
Reasons for MySQL Replication Lag
July 29, 2011 By 9 Comments
One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]
Battery Learning still problem many years after
February 10, 2011 By 7 Comments
The performance problems caused by battery auto learning go many years back. We wrote about it, other people from MySQL Community too. The situation did not get better, at least not with Dell RAID controllers, H700 and H800 have the same problem too. At the same time situation got worse as a lot more people [...]
Spreading .ibd files across multiple disks; the optimization that isn’t
December 25, 2010 By 23 Comments
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:
Webinar: Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup
November 26, 2010 By 2 Comments
We’ve had such a large number of signups to our Migrating MyISAM to InnoDB webinar, that we decided to hold one more before the year is out: December, 8th 9AM PST: Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup.
