James Day just posted the great summary of defaults changes in MySQL 5.6 compared to MySQL 5.5 In general there are a lot of good changes and many defaults are now computed instead of hardcoded. Though some of changes are rather puzzling for me. Lets go over them: back_log = 50 + ( max_connections / [...]
Distro Packages, Pre-built Binaries or Compile Your Own MySQL
September 4, 2012 By 7 Comments
I’ve been helping customers deploy and maintain MySQL (and variants) for the last couple of years and it has always been interesting to hear customer thoughts on how they want their servers installed. It has also been asked many times not only by our support and consulting customers, but widely from different forums and blogs [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Failure Scenarios with only 2 nodes
July 25, 2012 By 6 Comments
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 [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
June 20, 2012 By 63 Comments
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields
May 30, 2012 By 2 Comments
Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]
Secure passwords being insecure
May 27, 2012 By 6 Comments
If you follow the general advices to create secure password the following ones seem to be secure, right? s11P$||!sh&2 pr0&!!ke0 3kj39|!381 The answer to the question is, “it depends on how you use them” Notice that these passwords all contain multiple exclamation points and ampersands which are normally special characters for your shell. The people [...]
Can we improve MySQL variable handling ?
February 18, 2012 By 8 Comments
MySQL Settings (also known as Server Variables) have interesting property. When you set variable in running server this change is not persisted in any way and server will be back to old value upon restart. MySQL also does not have option to re-read config file without restarting as some other software so approach to change [...]
Why not make a tool to improve existing configurations?
February 10, 2012 By 4 Comments
A couple of users of our very popular MySQL Configuration Wizard have submitted feedback such as “I’d love to input my existing server settings and get suggestions on how to improve it.” This sounds like it would be great, doesn’t it? We’ve considered doing this, and even partially implemented it. But during our pre-release testing, [...]
Percona Replication Manager, a solution for MySQL high availability with replication using Pacemaker
November 29, 2011 By 102 Comments
The content of this article is outdated, look here for more up to date information. Over the last year, the frustration of many of us at Percona regarding issues with MMM has grown to a level where we started looking at other ways of achieving higher availability using MySQL replication. One of the weakness of [...]
What’s required to tune MySQL?
July 27, 2011 By 4 Comments
I got a serendipitous call (thanks!) yesterday asking what would be needed to tune[1] a database for better performance. It is a question that I hear often, but I never thought about answering it in public. Here’s a consolidated version of what I explained during our conversation.
