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 2
May 17, 2013 By 3 Comments
This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]
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 [...]
MySQL 5.6 Compatible Percona Toolkit 2.2 Released
March 25, 2013 By 2 Comments
A new Percona Toolkit series has been released: Percona Toolkit 2.2 for MySQL 5.6. Several months in the making and many new features, changes, and improvements make this a great new series. It replaces the 2.1 series for which we plan to do only one more bug fix release (as 2.1.10) then retire. 2.2 is [...]
Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif
January 9, 2013 By 1 Comment
There are times where you need to know exactly how much memory the mysqld server (or any other program) is using, where (i.e. for what function) it was allocated, how it got there (a backtrace, please!), and at what point in time the allocation happened. For example; you may have noticed a sharp memory increase [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC): what about GRA_*.log files ?
December 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment
How easy is it to identify and debug Percona XtraDB Cluster replication problem ? If you are using PXC, you may have already seen in your datadirectory several log files starting with GRA_ Those files correspond to a replication failure. That means the slave thread was not able to apply one transaction. For each of [...]
Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 – News from the Committee – Tutorial Selection Complete
December 3, 2012 By 1 Comment
As Percona Live London is raging in the UK, I thought it fitting to remind everyone about the next big Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 in Santa Clara, Californa on April 22-25, 2013. You can register NOW for this conference, and the Super Saving Registration deadline ends on December 28th, so be sure to [...]
Realtime stats to pay attention to in Percona XtraDB Cluster and Galera
November 26, 2012 By 4 Comments
I learn more and more about Galera every day. As I learn more, I try to keep my myq_gadgets toolkit up to date with what I consider is important to keep any eye on on a PXC node. In that spirit, I just today pushed some changes to the ‘wsrep’ report, and I thought I’d go over [...]
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 [...]
