May 21, 2013

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 [...]

Analyzing Slow Query Table in MySQL 5.6

Next week I’m teaching an online Percona Training class, called Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit.  This is a guided tour of best practices for pt-query-digest, the best tool for evaluating where your database response time is being spent. This month we saw the GA release of MySQL 5.6, and I wanted to check if any [...]

Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 is ready

About a month ago, we held a bug raffle for Percona Toolkit 2.1.9.  The turnout was good and the resulting release is worth upgrading to, especially if you were affected by the backwards-incompatible changes to pt-heartbeat in 2.1.8.  Here are the release notes for Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 which highlight the bugs fixed: Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 has been released. [...]

Adventures in archiving

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 [...]

How Can Percona MySQL Server Development Services Help ?

At Percona we offer a number of services. One of them, Custom MySQL Server Development, is commonly the most misunderstood and undervalued. There are a lot of ways Percona custom MySQL server development can help your business be more successful with MySQL. Here are some ways: Bugs – There are Bugs in MySQL, Percona Server, [...]

MySQL 5.6: Improvements in the Nutshell

Preparing for my talk for Percona MySQL University in Raleigh,NC, Tuesday 29th of January I have created the outline of improvements available in MySQL 5.6 which I thought was worth sharing to give a feel for how massive work have been done for this release in variety of areas. I’m sure the list is not [...]

Fun with the MySQL pager command

Last time I wrote about a few tips that can make you more efficient when using the command line on Unix. Today I want to focus more on pager. The most common usage of pager is to set it to a Unix pager such as less. It can be very useful to view the result [...]

Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 released today with beta support for MySQL 5.6

Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 was released today and the new version comes with some pretty cool news: Beta support for MySQL 5.6 (which as you might know is also in beta). In addition to various bug fixes, Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 also offers beta support for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC). Version 2.1.8 continues the trend of solid [...]

Serious build and testing automation

Here at Percona we’ve spent a lot of time improving our development and testing practices. Why? Because constant innovation keeps us ahead and more productive. We want to work smarter, not harder. One of the tools we use is the Jenkins Continuous Integration server. We use Jenkins pretty heavily to help with out development processes [...]

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 [...]