I recently had to do some customer work involving the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin and would like to share my experience in this post. Auditing user activity in MySQL has traditionally been challenging. Most data can be obtained from the slow or general log, but this involves a lot of data you don’t need too, and [...]
MySQL 5.6: Improvements in the Nutshell
Preparing for my talk for Percona MySQL University in Raleigh,NC, Tuesday 29th of January I have created the outline of improvements available in MySQL 5.6 which I thought was worth sharing to give a feel for how massive work have been done for this release in variety of areas. I’m sure the list is not [...]
Read/Write Splitting with PHP Webinar Questions Followup
Today I gave a presentation on “Read/Write Splitting with PHP” for Percona Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as I could during the session, but here are [...]
Common MySQL traps webinar questions followup
Thanks to all attendees of the webinar yesterday! If you missed it, you can watch the video recording. Here are some questions that remained unanswered due to time constraints. Q: Are there any technical considerations or best practice tips to have a replicated slave in the cloud, for example on Amazon AWS? Hardware resources are [...]
Recovering from a bad UPDATE statement
Did you just run an UPDATE against your 10 million row users table without a WHERE clause? Did you know that in MySQL 5.5 that sometimes you can recover from a bad UPDATE statement? This is possible if you are running in binlog_format=ROW ! Imagine this scenario:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | CREATE TABLE `t1` ( `c1` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `c2` varchar(10) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`c1`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB; INSERT INTO `t1` (`c2`) VALUES ('michael'), ('peter'), ('aamina'); |
We run an accidental UPDATE statement that [...]
Zero-Downtime Schema Changes In MySQL
The recording of yesterday’s webinar, as well as a PDF of my slide deck, is now available. You can watch the recording and get the slides here. I got a lot of questions, and did not have enough time to answer all of them, so let me try to answer some of the remaining questions [...]
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 [...]
Backing up binary log files with mysqlbinlog
Backing up binary logs are essential part of creating good backup infrastructure as it gives you the possibility for point in time recovery. After restoring a database from backup you have the option to recover changes that happend after taking a backup. The problem with this approach was that you had to do periodic filesystem [...]
Find where your data is replicated, win a Percona Live ticket
Percona Live London starts on Monday, so this is the last in the series of free-Percona-Live tickets we’ll give away. But first — have you ever wondered what servers are in your MySQL replication hierarchy? We have, too. As consultants, a lot of times we need to get a quick overview of the whole replication [...]

