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
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 [...]
Percona XtraBackup 2.0.7 for MySQL available for download
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0.7 for MySQL on May 6, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories. Percona XtraBackup is the world’s only open-source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking backups for InnoDB and XtraDB databases. This release is the current GA (Generally Available) [...]
Replication checksums in MySQL 5.6
MySQL 5.6 has an impressive list of improvements. Among them, replication checksums caught my attention as it seems that many people misunderstand the real added value of this new feature. I heard people think that with replication checksums, data integrity between the master and its replicas is now enforced. As we’ll see, it’s not that [...]
Announcing Percona Server 5.5.27-29.0
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.27-29.0 on October 11th, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.27, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.27-29.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
Comparing Percona XtraDB Cluster with Semi-Sync replication Cross-WAN
I have a customer who is considering Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a two colo WAN environment. They wanted me to do a test comparing PXC against semi-synchronous replication to see how they stack up against each other. Test Environment The test environment included AWS EC2 nodes in US-East and US-West (Oregon). The ping RTT latency [...]
InnoDB’s gap locks
One of the most important features of InnoDB is the row level locking. This feature provides better concurrency under heavy write load but needs additional precautions to avoid phantom reads and to get a consistent Statement based replication. To accomplish that, row level locking databases also acquire gap locks. What is a Phantom Read A [...]
Infinite Replication Loop
Last week I helped 2 different customers with infinite replication loops. I decided to write a blog post about these infinite loop of binary log statements in MySQL Replication. To explain what they are, how to identify them… and how to fix them.
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 [...]

