May 25, 2013

Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do

pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex.  Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities.  Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs.  The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]

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 [...]

Thank you for joining us at Percona Live, NYC 2012

Over 200 attendees attended last week’s Percona Live NY event. This year we structured event different than in 2011 with Tutorial Day allowing for in-depth 3 hour presentations for those looking to dive deep into specific topics. We also added an Expo Hall which allowed a lot of MySQL Ecosystem participant to meet their prospective [...]

Tools and Techniques for Index Design Webinar Questions Followup

I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of Tools and Techniques for Index Design. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. I’d like to invite folks who are interested in tools for query optimization to attend the new Percona [...]

Logging Deadlock errors

The principal source of information for InnoDB diagnostics is the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS but there are some sections that are not very useful. For example, LATEST DETECTED DEADLOCK only shows, as the name implies, the latest error detected. If you have 100 deadlocks per minute you will be able to see only [...]

How to lag a slave behind to avoid a disaster

MySQL Replication is useful and easy to setup. It is used for very different purposes. For example: split read and writes run data mining or reporting processes on them disaster recovery Is important to mention that a replication server is not a backup by itself. A mistake on the master, for example a DROP DATABASE [...]

When is MIN(DATE) != MIN(DATE) ?

Inspiration for this post is courtesy of a friend and former colleague of mine, Greg Youngblood, who pinged me last week with an interesting MySQL puzzle. He was running Percona Server 5.5.21 with a table structure that looks something like this:

When he ran this query:

The result came back as 2012-06-22 10:28:16. [...]

Percona XtraDB Cluster: Multi-node writing and Unexpected deadlocks

Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and the technology it uses (Galera) is an exciting alternative to traditional MySQL replication.  For those who don’t know, it gives you: Fully Synchronous replication with a write latency increase equivalent to a ping RTT to the furthest node Automatic cluster synchronization, both incremental and full restores The ability to read [...]

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar

I’m hosting MySQL Indexes: Best Practices Webinar next week, Wednesday August 15. In which I will talk about how MySQL indexes are structured and how they can be used, as well as go over the best practices in selecting correct indexes for your database workloads. Indexing looks like a very basic topic, but it is [...]