We are doing a migration from Amazon RDS to EC2 with a customer. This, unfortunately, involves some downtime – if you are an RDS user, you probably know you can’t replicate an RDS instance to an external server (or even EC2). While it is annoying, this post isn’t going to be a rant on how [...]
Percona Toolkit Webinar followup Q&A
First, a thank you to everyone who attended the webinar Today, I appreciate your time and nice comments. As promised, here are answers to questions that couldn’t be answered during the talk: Q: How do you install the tools? The manual has full details, but it’s important to know that the latest release for [...]
MySQL and predictive option handling – beware
MySQL command line utilities have an interesting property – if you only use the prefix of the option or command it will go over the list of available command and if there is only one command with matching prefix it will execute it with no warnings or any kind, otherwise it will report the error. [...]
Minimizing Downtime from Lengthy AWS Outages
Well, it happened again… Another lengthy EBS outage in the US-East region impacted several sites across the net. While failures like this are rare, they can be quite costly and translate into headaches for the operations team when impact production systems for any length of time. At Percona, we routinely help clients architect and deploy [...]
Automation: A case for synchronous replication
Just yesterday I wrote about math of automatic failover today I’ll share my thoughts about what makes MySQL failover different from many other components and why asynchronous nature of standard replication solution is causing problems with it. Lets first think about properties of simple components we fail over – web servers, application servers etc. We [...]
How to lag a slave behind to avoid a disaster
MySQL Replication is useful and easy to setup. It is used for very different purposes. For example: split read and writes run data mining or reporting processes on them disaster recovery Is important to mention that a replication server is not a backup by itself. A mistake on the master, for example a DROP DATABASE [...]
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 [...]
New variable slave_max_allowed_packet for slave servers
One month ago I wrote about how a big read_buffer_size could break the replication. The bug is not solved but now there is an official workaround to ease this problem using a new configuration variable: slave_max_allowed_packet This new variable will be available in 5.1.64, 5.5.26, and 5.6.6 and can establish a different limit on the [...]
STOP: DELETE IGNORE on Tables with Foreign Keys Can Break Replication
DELETE IGNORE suppresses errors and downgrades them as warnings, if you are not aware how IGNORE behaves on tables with FOREIGN KEYs, you could be in for a surprise. Let’s take a table with data as example, column c1 on table t2 references column c1 on table t1 – both columns have identical set of rows for [...]
Actively monitoring replication connectivity with MySQL’s heartbeat
Until MySQL 5.5 the only variable used to identify a network connectivity problem between Master and Slave was slave-net-timeout. This variable specifies the number of seconds to wait for more Binary Logs events from the master before abort the connection and establish it again. With a default value of 3600 this has been a historically [...]

