May 20, 2013

How to recover table structure from InnoDB dictionary

To recover a dropped or corrupt table with Percona Data Recovery Tool for InnoDB you need two things: media with records(ibdata1, *.ibd, disk image, etc.) and a table structure. Indeed, there is no information about the table structure in an InnoDB page. Normally we either recover the structure from .frm files or take it from [...]

Understanding the maximum number of columns in a MySQL table

This post was initially going to be two sets of polls: “What is the maximum number of columns in MySQL?” and “What is the minimum maximum number of columns in MySQL?”. Before you read on, ponder those questions and come up with your own answers… and see if you’re right or can prove me wrong! [...]

MySQL 5.6 Compatible Percona Toolkit 2.2 Released

A new Percona Toolkit series has been released: Percona Toolkit 2.2 for MySQL 5.6. Several months in the making and many new features, changes, and improvements make this a great new series. It replaces the 2.1 series for which we plan to do only one more bug fix release (as 2.1.10) then retire. 2.2 is [...]

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6: Part 2, The Queries!

This is part 2 in a 3 part series. In part 1, we took a quick look at some initial configuration of InnoDB full-text search and discovered a little bit of quirky behavior; here, we are going to run some queries and compare the result sets. Our hope is that the one of two things [...]

How to use a smartphone for two-factor authentication with Percona Server for MySQL

In this post I will describe a non-trivial way to authenticate users in Percona Sever for MySQL. Percona Server comes with PAM authentication plugin, which allows you to do a lot of cool things, such as: OS authentication, LDAP authentication, even RSA Secure Server authentication (which is useful if you are required a PCI-compliance), and [...]

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]

Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do

pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex.  Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities.  Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs.  The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]

Timezone and pt-table-checksum

I recently worked through an issue with a client trying to detect data drift across some servers that were located in different timezones.  Unfortunately, several of the tables had timestamp fields and were set to a default value of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP.  From the manual, here is how MySQL handles timezone locality with timestamp fields: Values for TIMESTAMP columns are [...]

Distro Packages, Pre-built Binaries or Compile Your Own MySQL

I’ve been helping customers deploy and maintain MySQL (and variants) for the last couple of years and it has always been interesting to hear customer thoughts on how they want their servers installed. It has also been asked many times not only by our support and consulting customers, but widely from different forums and blogs [...]

Hidden columns of query_review_history table

You can use pt-query-digest to process a MySQL slow query log and store historical values for review trend analysis into query_review_history table. According to its official documentation you can populate many columns in that table but there are other important ones such as ‘user’, ‘host’, ‘db’ which are not included by default. I will explain [...]