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 [...]
Distro Packages, Pre-built Binaries or Compile Your Own MySQL
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 [...]
SQL Injection Questions Followup
I presented a webinar today about SQL Injection, to try to clear up some of the misconceptions that many other blogs and articles have about this security risk. You can register for the webinar even now that I’ve presented it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording, which will be available soon. During [...]
Testing the Group Commit Fix
As you may know, Kristian Nielsen made a fix for the Group Commit Problem which we many times wrote about. The fix came into MariaDB 5.3 and Mark Callaghan tested it recently . We ported this patch to Percona Server (it is not in the main branch yet), and here are the results of my [...]
Using Flexviews – part two, change data capture
In my previous post I introduced materialized view concepts. This post begins with an introduction to change data capture technology and describes some of the ways in which it can be leveraged for your benefit. This is followed by a description of FlexCDC, the change data capture tool included with Flexviews. It continues with an [...]
What is innodb_support_xa?
A common misunderstanding about innodb_support_xa is that it enables user-initiated XA transactions, that is, transactions that are prepared and then committed on multiple systems, with an external transaction coordinator. This is actually not precisely what this option is for. It enables two-phase commit in InnoDB (prepare, then commit). This is necessary not only for user-initiated [...]
Replication of MEMORY (HEAP) Tables
Some Applications need to store some transient data which is frequently regenerated and MEMORY table look like a very good match for this sort of tasks. Unfortunately this will bite when you will be looking to add Replication to your environment as MEMORY tables do not play well with replication.
Upgrading MySQL
Upgrading MySQL Server is a very interesting task as you can approach it with so much different “depth”. For some this is 15 minutes job for others it is many month projects. Why is that ? Performing MySQL upgrade two things should normally worry you. It is Regressions – functionality regressions when what you’ve been [...]
7 Reasons why MySQL Quality will never be the same
I had a call with Monty the other day and I told him why I think MySQL Server Quality will never be the same again. I’ve been thinking a bit more about it and here is the extended list. In particular I think MySQL Server will never be able to reach its original quality guidelines [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

