I’ll be presenting a webinar next Wednesday, January 23 at 10 a.m. (Pacific Time), about issues application developers should think about for scaling out read-query traffic using multiple MySQL instances in a replication pair. Specifically, about the care we have to take because replication is asynchronous. This means the slave may not have current data [...]
Migrating several single standalone MySQL server to one Percona XtraDB Cluster… MariaDB to the rescue !
Some weeks ago I had to migrate some independent MySQL servers (some standard MySQL masters, and some just standalone) to a Percona XtraDB Cluster of 3 nodes. So the easiest way would be to configure each node to become also an asynchronous slave of one of the production servers. Like illustrated here: But in this [...]
Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)
I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding. They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]
Announcing Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.28-23.7
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster on November 15th, 2012. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories. Features: Percona XtraDB Cluster has ported Twitter’s MySQL NUMA patch. This patch implements improved NUMA support as it prevents imbalanced memory allocation across NUMA nodes. Number of binlog files [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster – installation and setup webinar follow up Q&A
Thanks for all, who attended my webinar, I got many questions and I wanted to take this opportunity to answer them. Q: Even ntp has a delay of 0.3-0.4 between servers does that mean a 0.25 as from logs can be an issue ? A: My demo vms were running for a few hours before [...]
Minimizing Downtime from Lengthy AWS Outages
Well, it happened again… Another lengthy EBS outage in the US-East region impacted several sites across the net. While failures like this are rare, they can be quite costly and translate into headaches for the operations team when impact production systems for any length of time. At Percona, we routinely help clients architect and deploy [...]
Automation: A case for synchronous replication
Just yesterday I wrote about math of automatic failover today I’ll share my thoughts about what makes MySQL failover different from many other components and why asynchronous nature of standard replication solution is causing problems with it. Lets first think about properties of simple components we fail over – web servers, application servers etc. We [...]
The Math of Automated Failover
There are number of people recently blogging about MySQL automated failover, based on production incident which GitHub disclosed. Here is my take on it. When we look at systems providing high availability we can identify 2 cases of system breaking down. First is when the system itself has a bug or limitations which does not [...]
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 [...]

