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 [...]
Migrating to XtraDB Cluster Webinar follow up questions
Thanks to all who attended my webinar today. The session was recorded and will be available to watch for free soon here. There were a lot of great questions asked during the session, so I’d like to take this opportunity to try to answer a few of them: Q: Is there an easy way to [...]
Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.0.0 GA
I’m really excited to today announce the first GA (Generally Available; i.e. stable) release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0. We have worked hard since our last major release on improving the reliability and user experience of Percona XtraBackup as well as adding features to make it better suited to more environments. The 2.0.0 release contains no [...]
How FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK works with Innodb Tables
Many backup tools including Percona Xtrabackup, MyLVMBackup and others use FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK to temporary make MySQL read only. In many cases the period for which server has to be made read only is very short, just few seconds, yet the impact of FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK can be quite large because [...]
Announcing Percona XtraBackup 1.9.1
Percona is glad to announce the second beta release towards Percona XtraBackup 2.0! We call this version 1.9.1 as we are using the 1.9.x version numbers for betas of 2.0 to clearly differentiate beta releases from the final 2.0 release. We do not recommend using Beta releases in production. Link to BETA version and Release notes.
Faster Point In Time Recovery with LVM2 Snaphots and Binary Logs
LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins
In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]
XtraBackup 1.6.4 respin
Very shortly after the XtraBackup 1.6.4 binaries hit the downloads site and repositories, it was found to have a bug where the master information was not properly stored, thus breaking point in time recovery and the ability to start a slave from a backup. This was caught and fixed really quickly and we’ve re-spun the [...]
Percona XtraBackup 1.6.4
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 1.6.4 on 19 December, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). These release notes are (as always) available from the online Percona XtraBackup documentation. This release is purely composed of bug fixes and is the current stable release of Percona XtraBackup. In this release we now [...]
Fishing with dynamite, brought to you by the randgen and dbqp
I tend to speak highly of the random query generator as a testing tool and thought I would share a story that shows how it can really shine. At our recent dev team meeting, we spent approximately 30 minutes of hack time to produce test cases for 3 rather hard to duplicate bugs. Of course, [...]

