I recently had to do some customer work involving the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin and would like to share my experience in this post. Auditing user activity in MySQL has traditionally been challenging. Most data can be obtained from the slow or general log, but this involves a lot of data you don’t need too, and [...]
Replication in MySQL 5.6: GTIDs benefits and limitations – Part 1
May 21, 2013 By 3 Comments
Global Transactions Identifiers are one of the new features regarding replication in MySQL 5.6. They open up a lot of opportunities to make the life of DBAs much easier when having to maintain servers under a specific replication topology. However you should keep in mind some limitations of the current implementation. This post is the [...]
Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 1
May 16, 2013 By 3 Comments
(This is part one of a two part series) Over the past few weeks I have been looking at a preview release of Virident’s vCache software, which is a kernel module and set of utilities designed to provide functionality similar to that of FlashCache. In particular, Virident engaged Percona to do a usability and feature-set [...]
Follow these basics when migrating to Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL
May 1, 2013 By 10 Comments
Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these [...]
Webinar: Best Practices for MySQL Scalability on May 1
April 30, 2013 By Leave a Comment
If you have not already done so, I encourage you to register for my “Best Practices for MySQL Scalability” Webinar which will take place on May 1st at 10 a.m. PST. This will be an overview presentation, led by me and providing a high-level look at the components of MySQL scalability: application architecture, MySQL version [...]
High-load problems? Investigate them with ‘pt-query-digest’
April 23, 2013 By 2 Comments
I had the chance to work on an interesting case last week, and I thought I’d share what I think is a little known goodie from Percona Toolkit for MySQL called pt-query-digest. One customer was suffering from periods of high load on their database server, leading to degraded application performance, and sometimes even short moments [...]
The write cache: Swap insanity tome III
April 19, 2013 By 5 Comments
Swapping has always been something bad for MySQL performance but it is even more important for HA systems. It is so important to avoid swapping with HA that NDB cluster basically forbids calling malloc after the startup phase and hence its rather complex configuration. Probably most readers of this blog know (or should know) about [...]
10 years of MySQL User Conferences
April 11, 2013 By 6 Comments
In preparing for this month’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, I’ve been reminiscing about the annual MySQL User Conference’s history – the 9 times it previously took place in its various reincarnations – and there are a lot of good things, fun things to remember. 2003 was the year that marked the first MySQL user conference [...]
Understanding the maximum number of columns in a MySQL table
April 8, 2013 By 5 Comments
This post was initially going to be two sets of polls: “What is the maximum number of columns in MySQL?” and “What is the minimum maximum number of columns in MySQL?”. Before you read on, ponder those questions and come up with your own answers… and see if you’re right or can prove me wrong! [...]
Facebook at Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo and Advanced Registration Ending Soon
March 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Facebook is a major user of MySQL and has pushed the performance limits of the technology. Their MySQL experts have deep, hands on knowledge of the technology. I’m pleased to welcome Mark Callaghan, Software Engineer for Database Infrastructure at Facebook, back again this year to the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo to share his [...]
