May 24, 2013

Disconnecting a replication slave is easier with MySQL 5.5+ (RESET SLAVE vs. RESET SLAVE ALL)

It’s not uncommon to promote a server from slave to master. One of the key things to protect your data integrity is to make sure that the promoted slave is permanently disconnected from its old master. If not, it may get writes from the old master, which can cause all kinds of data corruption. MySQL [...]

MySQL Backup tools used by Percona Remote DBA for MySQL

As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic [...]

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

Replication checksums in MySQL 5.6

MySQL 5.6 has an impressive list of improvements. Among them, replication checksums caught my attention as it seems that many people misunderstand the real added value of this new feature. I heard people think that with replication checksums, data integrity between the master and its replicas is now enforced. As we’ll see, it’s not that [...]

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 [...]

Announcing Percona Playback 0.5

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Playback 0.5 on November 26th, 2012. Downloads are available from our download site and Percona Software Repositories. Percona Playback is a tool for replaying the load of one database server to another. Currently it can read queries from MySQL query-log and tcpdump files and run them [...]

Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO

Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]

Percona XtraDB Cluster: Failure Scenarios with only 2 nodes

During the design period of a new cluster, it is always advised to have at least 3 nodes (this is the case with PXC but it’s also the same with PRM). But why and what are the risks ? The goal of having more than 2 nodes, in fact an odd number is recommended in [...]

Introducing new type of benchmark

Traditionally the most benchmarks are focusing on throughput. We all get used to that, and in fact in our benchmarks, sysbench and tpcc-mysql, the final result is also represents the throughput (transactions per second in sysbench; NewOrder transactions Per Minute in tpcc-mysql). However, like Mark Callaghan mentioned in comments, response time is way more important [...]

How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins

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 [...]