May 23, 2013

Galera Flow Control in Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL

Last week at Percona Live, I delivered a six-hour tutorial about Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL.  I actually had more material than I covered (by design), but one thing I regret we didn’t cover was Flow control.  So, I thought I’d write a post covering flow control because it is important to understand. What [...]

How to recover table structure from InnoDB dictionary

To recover a dropped or corrupt table with Percona Data Recovery Tool for InnoDB you need two things: media with records(ibdata1, *.ibd, disk image, etc.) and a table structure. Indeed, there is no information about the table structure in an InnoDB page. Normally we either recover the structure from .frm files or take it from [...]

CentOS 5.8 users: your UTF-8 data is in peril with Perl MySQL

CentOS 5.8 and earlier use Perl module DBD::mysql v3.0007 which has a bug that causes Perl not to flag UTF-8 data as being UTF-8.  Presuming that the MySQL table/column is using UTF-8, and the Perl MySQL connection is also using UTF-8, then a correct system returns: PV = 0x9573840 "\343\203\213 \303\250"\0 [UTF8 "\x{30cb} \x{e8}"] That’s a Devel::Peek inside a Perl scalar variable which [...]

Can’t Create Thread: Errno 11 (A Tale of Two Ulimits)

Recently some of my fellow Perconians and I have noticed a bit of an uptick in customer cases featuring the following error message:

The canonical solution to this issue, if you do a bit of Googling, is to increase the number of processes / threads available to the MySQL user, typically by adding a [...]

Be productive with the MySQL command line

Even if you are using a GUI tool to connect to your MySQL servers, one day or another, you will have to deal with the command line. So it is nice to know a few tips that can really make your work easier. Note: The commands below are only available for Unix/Linux. Using pager Most [...]

Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC): what about GRA_*.log files ?

How easy is it to identify and debug Percona XtraDB Cluster replication problem ? If you are using PXC, you may have already seen in your datadirectory several log files starting with GRA_ Those files correspond to a replication failure. That means the slave thread was not able to apply one transaction. For each of [...]

Using pt-table-checksum with Percona XtraDB Cluster

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 [...]

On Character Sets and Disappearing Tables

The MySQL manual tells us that regardless of whether or not we use “SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0″ before making schema changes, InnoDB will not allow a column referenced by a foreign key constraint to be modified in such a way that the foreign key will reference a column with a mismatched data type. For instance, if we [...]

Find and remove duplicate indexes

Having duplicate keys in our schemas can hurt the performance of our database: They make the optimizer phase slower because MySQL needs to examine more query plans. The storage engine needs to maintain, calculate and update more index statistics DML and even read queries can be slower because MySQL needs update fetch more data to [...]

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 [...]