While we do have many blog posts on replication on our blog, such as on replication being single-threaded, on semi-synchronous replication or on estimating replication capacity, I don’t think we have one that covers the very basics of how MySQL replication really works on the high level. Or it’s been so long ago I can’t [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
How Does Semisynchronous MySQL Replication Work?
With the recent release of Percona XtraDB Cluster, I am increasingly being asked about MySQL’s semi-synchronous replication. I find that there are often a number of misconceptions about how semi-synchronous replication really works. I think it is very important to understand what guarantees you actually get with semi-synchronous replication, and what you don’t get. The [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.0.1 and 1.0.2 released
I’m happy to announce that we’ve released Percona Toolkit 2.0.1, a major new version of our essential DBA toolkit, as well as a minor bugfix update to the old 1.0.x series. You can download it from the project homepage, or install it through our RPM and DEB repositories. Documentation is online (and the 1.0 docs [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 2: The Binary Log
This is the second in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in certain circumstances (links: part 1). In the first part, I wrote about single-threaded replication. Upstream from the replicas is the primary, which enables replication by writing a so-called “binary log” of events that modify data in the server. The binary log is [...]
The Doom of Multiple Storage Engines
One of the big “Selling Points” of MySQL is support for Multiple Storage engines, and from the glance view it is indeed great to provide users with same top level SQL interface allowing them to store their data many different way. As nice as it sounds the in theory this benefit comes at very significant [...]
MongoDB Approach to database synchronization
I went to MongoSF today – quite an event, and I hope to have a chance to write more about it. This post is about one replication problem and how MongoDB solves it. If you’re using MySQL Replication when your master goes down it is possible for some writes to be executed on the master, [...]
Tokyo Tyrant – The Extras Part I : Is it Durable?
You know how in addition to the main movie you have extras on the DVD. Extra commentary, bloopers, extra scenes, etc? Well welcome the Tyrant extras. With my previous blog posts I was trying to set-up a case for looking at NOSQL tools, and not meant to be a decision making tool. Each solution has [...]
When would you use SAN with MySQL ?
One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?
Making replication a bit more reliable
Running MySQL slave is quite common and regular task which we do every day, taking backups from slave is often recommended solution. However the current state of MySQL replication makes restoring slave a bit tricky (if possible at all). The main problem is that InnoDB transaction state and replication state are not synchronized. If we [...]

