May 22, 2013

Replication checksums in MySQL 5.6

February 15, 2013 By 3 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: MySQL Tagged With: , , ,

Adventures in archiving

February 11, 2013 By 16 Comments

One of our Remote DBA service clients recently had an issue with size on disk for a particular table; in short this table was some 25 million rows of application audit data with an on disk size of 345GB recorded solely for the purposes of debugging which may or may not occur. Faced with the task of [...]

Filed Under: MySQL Tagged With: , ,

Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters

January 15, 2013 By 9 Comments

One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , ,

CVE-2012-4414 strikes back in MySQL 5.5.29 (and what we’re doing in Percona Server 5.5.29)

January 13, 2013 By 4 Comments

In preparing Percona Server 5.5.29 (not yet released, but soon), I filed MySQL bug 68045 (is marked private as it’s a security bug). This bug is in relation to the Oracle fix for CVE-2012-4414 and a problem I found with it. The MariaDB fix (which we incorporated into Percona Server 5.5.28-29.3) is not affected. When the [...]

Filed Under: MySQL, Percona Software Tagged With: , ,

Is there room for more MySQL IO Optimization?

January 3, 2013 By 11 Comments

I prefer to run MySQL with innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT in most cases – it makes sure there is no overhead of double buffering and I can save the limited amount of file system cache I would normally have on database server for those things which need to be cached — system files, binary log, FRM files, MySQL [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: , ,

Percona Toolkit Webinar followup Q&A

December 19, 2012 By 1 Comment

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: ,

Full table scan vs full index scan performance

November 23, 2012 By 15 Comments

Earlier this week, Cédric blogged about how easy we can get confused between a covering index and a full index scan in the EXPLAIN output. While a covering index (seen with EXPLAIN as Extra: Using index) is a very interesting performance optimization, a full index scan (type: index) is according to the documentation the 2nd [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: ,

Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do

November 1, 2012 By 1 Comment

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Percona Software Tagged With:

Using pt-table-checksum with Percona XtraDB Cluster

October 15, 2012 By 2 Comments

As of Percona Toolkit v2.1.5, pt-table-checksum works correctly with Percona XtraDB Cluster, but it doesn’t work quite like a traditional replication setup because cluster nodes are not like traditional replicas.  In this post I demonstrate how to use pt-table-checksum with Percona XtraDB Cluster. First, you’ll need Percona Toolkit v2.1.5 or newer and Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.27-23.6 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Percona Software, XtraDB Cluster Tagged With: ,

Timezone and pt-table-checksum

September 25, 2012 By 1 Comment

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL, Percona Software
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »