A few weeks back, I was working on a customer issue wherein they were observing database performance that dropped through the floor (to the point of an outage) roughly every 4 weeks or so. Nothing special about the environment, the hardware, or the queries; really, the majority of the database was a single table with [...]
How to obtain the “LES” (Last Executed Statement) from an Optimized Core Dump?
Ever ran into a situation where you saw “some important variable you really needed to know about=<optimized out>” while debugging?
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Failure Scenarios with only 2 nodes
During the design period of a new cluster, it is always advised to have at least 3 nodes (this is the case with PXC but it’s also the same with PRM). But why and what are the risks ? The goal of having more than 2 nodes, in fact an odd number is recommended in [...]
Faster Point In Time Recovery with LVM2 Snaphots and Binary Logs
LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
Percona Replication Manager, a solution for MySQL high availability with replication using Pacemaker
The content of this article is outdated, look here for more up to date information. Over the last year, the frustration of many of us at Percona regarding issues with MMM has grown to a level where we started looking at other ways of achieving higher availability using MySQL replication. One of the weakness of [...]
Avoiding auto-increment holes on InnoDB with INSERT IGNORE
Are you using InnoDB tables on MySQL version 5.1.22 or newer? If so, you probably have gaps in your auto-increment columns. A simple INSERT IGNORE query creates gaps for every ignored insert, but this is undocumented behaviour. This documentation bug is already submitted. Firstly, we will start with a simple question. Why do we have [...]
MySQL opening .frm even when table is in table definition cache
or… “the case of Stewart recognizing parameters to the read() system call in strace output”. Last week, a colleague asked a question: I have an instance of MySQL with 100 tables and the table_definition_cache set to 1000. My understanding of this is that MySQL won’t revert to opening the FRM files to read the table [...]
Improved InnoDB fast index creation
One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER TABLE [...]
Percona Xtrabackup 1.6.2 released!
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 1.6.2 on 25 July, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from thePercona Software Repositories). This release is purely composed of bug fixes and is the current stable release of Percona Xtrabackup. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release and [...]
Percona XtraBackup 1.6
Percona XtraBackup 1.6 is now available for download and is the current stable release version of XtraBackup.

