Upgrades are usually one of the biggest part of any database infrastructure maintenance. Even with enough planning something else can go bad after sending your production application to the version you’ve upgraded to. Let’s look at how one Percona Toolkit tool, pt-upgrade can help you identify what to expect and test your upgrades better which [...]
Statement based replication with Stored Functions, Triggers and Events
Statement based replication writes the queries that modify data in the Binary Log to replicate them on the slave or to use it as a PITR recovery. Here we will see what is the behavior of the MySQL when it needs to log “not usual” queries like Events, Functions, Stored Procedures, Local Variables, etc. We’ll [...]
Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views
Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]
MongoDB Approach to Availability
Another thing I find interesting about MongoDB is its approach to Durability, Data Consistency and Availability. It is very relaxed and will not work for some applications but for others it can be usable in current form. Let me explain some concepts and compare it to technologies in MySQL space. First I think MongoDB is [...]
MongoDB Approach to database synchronization
I went to MongoSF today – quite an event, and I hope to have a chance to write more about it. This post is about one replication problem and how MongoDB solves it. If you’re using MySQL Replication when your master goes down it is possible for some writes to be executed on the master, [...]
How expensive is MySQL Replication for the Master
I generally thought about MySQL replication as being quite low overhead on Master, depending on number of Slaves. What kind of load extra Slave causes ? Well it just gets a copy of binary log streamed to it. All slaves typically get few last events in binary log so it is in cash. In most [...]
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 [...]
Looking at Redis
Recently I had a chance to take a look at Redis project, which is semi-persistent in memory database with idea somethat similar to memcache but richer feature set. Redis has simple single process event driven design, which means it does not have to deal with any locks which is performance killer for a lot of [...]
Just how useful are binary logs for incremental backups?
We’ve written about replication slaves lagging behind masters before, but one of the other side effects of the binary log being serialized, is that it also limits the effectiveness of using it for incremental backup. Let me make up some numbers for the purposes of this example: We have 2 Servers in a Master-Slave topology. [...]
When would you use SAN with MySQL ?
One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?

