I recently worked on upgrading MySQL from one of very early MySQL 5.0 versions to Percona Server 5.1. This was a classical upgrade scenario which can cause surprises. Master and few slaves need to be upgraded. It is a shared database used by tons of applications written by many people over more than 5 years [...]
Just how useful are binary logs for incremental backups?
We’ve written about replication slaves lagging behind masters before, but one of the other side effects of the binary log being serialized, is that it also limits the effectiveness of using it for incremental backup. Let me make up some numbers for the purposes of this example: We have 2 Servers in a Master-Slave topology. [...]
Faster MySQL failover with SELECT mirroring
One of my favorite MySQL configurations for high availability is master-master replication, which is just like normal master-slave replication except that you can fail over in both directions. Aside from MySQL Cluster, which is more special-purpose, this is probably the best general-purpose way to get fast failover and a bunch of other benefits (non-blocking ALTER [...]
Three ways to know when a MySQL slave is about to start lagging
The trouble with slave lag is that you often can’t see it coming. Especially if the slave’s load is pretty uniform, a slave that’s at 90% of its capacity to keep up with the master can be indistinguishable from one that’s at 5% of its capacity. So how can you tell when your slave is [...]
Why audit logging with triggers in MySQL is bad for replication
Recently I was tasked with investigating slippage between master and slave in a standard replication setup. The client was using Maatkit’s mk-table-checksum to check his slave data was indeed a fair copy of that of the master.
Recovery beyond data restore
Quite frequently I see customers looking at recovery as on ability to restore data from backup which can be far from being enough to restore the whole system to operating state, especially for complex systems. Instead of looking just at data restore process you better look at the whole process which is required to bring [...]
Troubleshooting Relay Log Corruption in MySQL
Have you ever seen the replication stopped with message like this: Last_Error: Could not parse relay log event entry. The possible reasons are: the master’s binary log is corrupted (you can check this by running ‘mysqlbinlog’ on the binary log), the slave’s relay log is corrupted (you can check this by running ‘mysqlbinlog’ on the [...]
How to load large files safely into InnoDB with LOAD DATA INFILE
Recently I had a customer ask me about loading two huge files into InnoDB with LOAD DATA INFILE. The goal was to load this data on many servers without putting it into the binary log. While this is generally a fast way to load data (especially if you disable unique key checks and foreign key [...]
Resyncing table on MySQL Slave
Sometimes MySQL Replication may run out of sync – because of its own buts or operational limitations or because of application mistake, such as writing to the slave when you should be only writing to the master. In any case you need slave to be synced with Master. To discover the difference between Master and [...]
Percona is looking for a Perl and Python expert
If you’re a Perl and/or Python expert (preferably both), Percona may have a job for you. We’re looking to either hire or sponsor significant development efforts for some open-source tools for MySQL, including but not limited to Maatkit and the Master-Master Replication Manager. This could be full-time or part-time, depending on the person and what [...]

