May 21, 2013

Recovery after DROP & CREATE

In a very popular data loss scenario a table is dropped and empty one is created with the same name. This is because  mysqldump in many cases generates the “DROP TABLE” instruction before the “CREATE TABLE”:

If there were no subsequent CREATE TABLE the recovery would be trivial. Index_id of the PRIMARY index of [...]

DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL

Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]

Emulating global transaction ID with pt-heartbeat

Global transaction IDs are being considered for a future version of MySQL. A global transaction ID lets you determine a server’s replication position reliably, among other benefits. This is great when you need to switch a replica to another master, or any number of other needs. Sometimes you can’t wait for the real thing, but [...]

Connecting orphaned .ibd files

There are two ways InnoDB can organize tablespaces. First is when all data, indexes and system buffers are stored in a single tablespace. This is typicaly one or several ibdata files. A well known innodb_file_per_table option brings the second one. Tables and system areas are split into different files. Usually system tablespace is located in [...]

Using Flexviews – part two, change data capture

In my previous post I introduced materialized view concepts. This post begins with an introduction to change data capture technology and describes some of the ways in which it can be leveraged for your benefit. This is followed by a description of FlexCDC, the change data capture tool included with Flexviews. It continues with an [...]

How Percona diagnoses MySQL server stalls

We receive many requests for help with server stalls. They come under various names: lockup, freeze, sudden slowdown. When something happens only once or twice a day, it can be difficult to catch it in action. Unfortunately, this often leads to trial-and-error approaches, which can drag on for days (or even months), and cause a [...]

Joining on range? Wrong!

The problem I am going to describe is likely to be around since the very beginning of MySQL, however unless you carefully analyse and profile your queries, it might easily go unnoticed. I used it as one of the examples in our talk given at phpDay.it conference last week to demonstrate some pitfalls one may [...]

Debugging problems with row based replication

MySQL 5.1 introduces row based binary logging. In fact, the default binary logging format in GA versions of MySQL 5.1 is ‘MIXED’ STATEMENT*;   The binlog_format  variable can still be changed per sessions which means it is possible that some of your binary log entries will be written in a row-based fashion instead of the [...]

Statistics of InnoDB tables and indexes available in xtrabackup

If you ever wondered how big is that or another index in InnoDB … you had to calculate it yourself by multiplying size of row (which I should add is harder in the case of a VARCHAR – since you need to estimate average length) on count of records. And it still would be quite [...]

Testing InnoDB “Barracuda” format with compression

New features of InnoDB – compression format and fast index creation sound so promising so I spent some time to research time and sizes on data we have on our production. The schema of one of shards is