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 [...]
Analyzing Slow Query Table in MySQL 5.6
Next week I’m teaching an online Percona Training class, called Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit. This is a guided tour of best practices for pt-query-digest, the best tool for evaluating where your database response time is being spent. This month we saw the GA release of MySQL 5.6, and I wanted to check if any [...]
Can’t Create Thread: Errno 11 (A Tale of Two Ulimits)
Recently some of my fellow Perconians and I have noticed a bit of an uptick in customer cases featuring the following error message:
1 2 | SQLSTATE[HY000] [1135] Can't create a new thread (errno 11); if you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug. |
The canonical solution to this issue, if you do a bit of Googling, is to increase the number of processes / threads available to the MySQL user, typically by adding a [...]
MySQL 5.6: Improvements in the Nutshell
Preparing for my talk for Percona MySQL University in Raleigh,NC, Tuesday 29th of January I have created the outline of improvements available in MySQL 5.6 which I thought was worth sharing to give a feel for how massive work have been done for this release in variety of areas. I’m sure the list is not [...]
Common MySQL traps webinar questions followup
Thanks to all attendees of the webinar yesterday! If you missed it, you can watch the video recording. Here are some questions that remained unanswered due to time constraints. Q: Are there any technical considerations or best practice tips to have a replicated slave in the cloud, for example on Amazon AWS? Hardware resources are [...]
Auditing login attempts in MySQL
This is a recurrent question made by our MySQL Support customers: How can I audit the login attempts in MySQL? Logging all the attempts or just the failed ones is a very important task on some scenarios. Unfortunately there are not too many audit capabilities in MySQL Community so the first option to audit MySQL’s [...]
Be productive with the MySQL command line
Even if you are using a GUI tool to connect to your MySQL servers, one day or another, you will have to deal with the command line. So it is nice to know a few tips that can really make your work easier. Note: The commands below are only available for Unix/Linux. Using pager Most [...]
Get Me Some Query Logs!
One of my favorite tools in the Percona Toolkit is pt-query-digest. This tool is indispensable for identifying your top SQL queries, and analyzing which queries are accounting for your database load. But the report you get from pt-query-digest is only as good as the log of queries you give it as input. You need a large [...]
Logging Foreign Key errors
In the last blog post I wrote about how to log deadlock errors using Percona Toolkit. Foreign key errors have the same problems. InnoDB only logs the last error in the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS, so we need another similar tool in order to have historical data. pt-fk-error-logger This is a tool very [...]

