In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]
The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages
This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship. Some basic facts Most of us know that writing into Innodb updates buffer [...]
How to recover a single InnoDB table from a Full Backup
Sometimes we need to restore only some tables from a full backup maybe because your data loss affect a small number of your tables. In this particular scenario is faster to recover single tables than a full backup. This is easy with MyISAM but if your tables are InnoDB the process is a little bit [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster Feature 2: Multi-Master replication
This is about the second great feature – Multi-Master replication, what you get with Percona XtraDB Cluster. It is recommended you get familiar with general architecture of the cluster, described on the previous post. By Multi-Master I mean the ability to write to any node in your cluster and do not worry that eventually you [...]
Which Linux distribution for a MySQL database server? A specific point of view.
One of the more common questions I get asked is which Linux distribution I would use for a MySQL database server. Bearing the responsibility for someone else’s success means I should advise something that is stable, reliable, easy to manage and has plenty of resources available online. It should also allow running MySQL without too [...]
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 [...]
Innodb row size limitation
I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.
How to debug long-running transactions in MySQL
Among the many things that can cause a “server stall” is a long-running transaction. If a transaction remains open for a very long time without committing, and has modified data, then other transactions could block and fail with a lock wait timeout. The problem is, it can be very difficult to find the offending code [...]
MySQL 5.5.8 – in search of stability
A couple of days ago, Dimitri published a blog post, Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5, which was a response to my post, MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive. I will refer to Dimitri’s article as article [1]. As always, Dimitri has provided a very detailed and thoughtful article, and I strongly recommend reading if [...]
Sharing an auto_increment value across multiple MySQL tables
The title is SEO bait – you can’t do it. We’ve seen a few recurring patterns trying to achieve similar – and I thought I would share with you my favorite two: Option #1: Use a table to insert into, and grab the insert_id:
1 2 3 4 5 | CREATE TABLE option1 (id int not null primary key auto_increment) engine=innodb; # each insert does one operations to get the value: INSERT INTO option1 VALUES (NULL); # $connection->insert_id(); |
Option #2: Use a table with one just row:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | CREATE TABLE option2 (id int not null primary key) engine=innodb; INSERT INTO option2 VALUES (1); # start from 1 # each insert does two operations to get the value: UPDATE option2 SET id=@id:=id+1; SELECT @id; |

