Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]
Replication of MEMORY (HEAP) Tables
Some Applications need to store some transient data which is frequently regenerated and MEMORY table look like a very good match for this sort of tasks. Unfortunately this will bite when you will be looking to add Replication to your environment as MEMORY tables do not play well with replication.
The story of one MySQL Upgrade
I recently worked on upgrading MySQL from one of very early MySQL 5.0 versions to Percona Server 5.1. This was a classical upgrade scenario which can cause surprises. Master and few slaves need to be upgraded. It is a shared database used by tons of applications written by many people over more than 5 years [...]
Debugging problems with row based replication
MySQL 5.1 introduces row based binary logging. In fact, the default binary logging format in GA versions of MySQL 5.1 is ‘MIXED’ STATEMENT*; The binlog_format variable can still be changed per sessions which means it is possible that some of your binary log entries will be written in a row-based fashion instead of the [...]
Upgrading MySQL
Upgrading MySQL Server is a very interesting task as you can approach it with so much different “depth”. For some this is 15 minutes job for others it is many month projects. Why is that ? Performing MySQL upgrade two things should normally worry you. It is Regressions – functionality regressions when what you’ve been [...]
Finding your MySQL High-Availability solution – Replication
In the last 2 blog posts about High Availability for MySQL we have introduced definitions and provided a list of ( questions that you need to ask yourself before choosing a HA solution. In this new post, we will cover what is the most popular HA solution for MySQL, replication.
State of the art: Galera – synchronous replication for InnoDB
First time I heard about Galera on Percona Performance Conference 2009, Seppo Jaakola was presenting “Galera: Multi-Master Synchronous MySQL Replication Clusters”. It was impressed as I personally always wanted it for InnoDB, but we had it in plans at the bottom of the list, as this is very hard to implement properly. The idea by [...]
Finding your MySQL High-Availability solution – The questions
After having reviewed the definition my the previous post (The definitions), the next step is to respond to some questions. Do you need MySQL High-Availability? That question is quite obvious but some times, it is skipped. It can also be formulated “What is the downtime cost of the service?”. In the cost, you need to [...]
KISS KISS KISS
When I visit customers quite often they tell me about number of creative techniques they heard on the conferences, read on the blogs, forums and Internet articles and they ask me if they should use them. My advice is frequently – do not. It is fun to be creative but creative solutions also means unproven [...]
Pretending to fix broken group commit
The problem with broken group commit was discusses many times, bug report was reported 3.5Â years ago and still not fixed in MySQLÂ 5.0/5.1 (and most likely will not be in MySQLÂ 5.1). Although the rough truth is this bug is very hard (if possible) to fix properly. In short words if you enable replication (log-bin) on server [...]

