May 19, 2013

Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.0.0 GA

I’m really excited to today announce the first GA (Generally Available; i.e. stable) release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0. We have worked hard since our last major release on improving the reliability and user experience of Percona XtraBackup as well as adding features to make it better suited to more environments. The 2.0.0 release contains no [...]

How FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK works with Innodb Tables

Many backup tools including Percona Xtrabackup, MyLVMBackup and others use FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK to temporary make MySQL read only. In many cases the period for which server has to be made read only is very short, just few seconds, yet the impact of FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK can be quite large because [...]

Introducing new type of benchmark

Traditionally the most benchmarks are focusing on throughput. We all get used to that, and in fact in our benchmarks, sysbench and tpcc-mysql, the final result is also represents the throughput (transactions per second in sysbench; NewOrder transactions Per Minute in tpcc-mysql). However, like Mark Callaghan mentioned in comments, response time is way more important [...]

Backing up binary log files with mysqlbinlog

Backing up binary logs are essential part of creating good backup infrastructure as it gives you the possibility for point in time recovery. After restoring a database from backup you have the option to recover changes that happend after taking a backup. The problem with this approach was that you had to do periodic filesystem [...]

Percona XtraDB Cluster Feature 1: High Availability

There and in coming posts I am going to cover main features of Percona XtraDB Cluster. The first feature is High Availability. But before jumping to HA, let’s review general architecture of the Percona XtraDB Cluster.

dbqp and Xtrabackup testing

So I’m back from the Percona dev team’s recent meeting.  While there, we spent a fair bit of time discussing Xtrabackup development.  One of our challenges is that as we add richer features to the tool, we need equivalent testing capabilities.  However, it seems a constant in the MySQL world that available QA tools often [...]

Reasons for MySQL Replication Lag

One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]

Product to try: MySQL/MariaDB-Galera 0.8

I wrote about Galera about 1.5 years ago: State of the art: Galera – synchronous replication for InnoDB. It was about the 0.7 release, which was more like a proof-of-concept release (though Galera’s developers may not agree with that ) with some serious limitations (like using mysqldump for node propagation). The Galera team heard my [...]

A recovery trivia or how to recover from a lost ibdata1 file

A few day ago, a customer came to Percona needing to recover data. Basically, while doing a transfer from one SAN to another, something went wrong and they lost the ibdata1 file, where all the table meta-data is stored. Fortunately, they were running with innodb_file_per_table so the data itself was available. What they could provide [...]

Connecting orphaned .ibd files

There are two ways InnoDB can organize tablespaces. First is when all data, indexes and system buffers are stored in a single tablespace. This is typicaly one or several ibdata files. A well known innodb_file_per_table option brings the second one. Tables and system areas are split into different files. Usually system tablespace is located in [...]