May 24, 2013

Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)

I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding.  They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]

Debugging MySQL SSL problems

This is not necessarily going to be a comprehensive post, but I learned somethings about MySQL SSL today that I thought would be worth sharing. I was setting up a PRM install for a customer and one of the requirements was SSL replication.  In this particular case, I had setup PRM first, and then was [...]

Webinar: The Hazards of Multi-writing in a Dual-Master Setup

On November 15th at 1PM Eastern / 10 AM Pacific, I will be giving a webinar entitled “The Hazards of Multi-writing in a Dual-Master Setup“.  In my experience many people do not understand the difficulty of managing writes to RDBMS datastores in a high availability environment, especially where asynchronous replication is used (which is almost everywhere). [...]

Percona XtraDB Cluster – installation and setup webinar follow up Q&A

Thanks for all, who attended my webinar, I got many questions and I wanted to take this opportunity to answer them. Q: Even ntp has a delay of 0.3-0.4 between servers does that mean a 0.25 as from logs can be an issue ? A: My demo vms were running for a few hours before [...]

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 [...]

Upcoming webinar on PRM

Just a reminder that Wednesday the 26th at 10am Pacific time, I’ll give a webinar on PRM, the Percona replication manager. During the webinar, I’ll walk you through the setup of a PRM cluster and show you how to perform some basic management tasks. If you are interested, click here to register. See you Wednesday! [...]

Automation: A case for synchronous replication

Just yesterday I wrote about math of automatic failover today I’ll share my thoughts about what makes MySQL failover different from many other components and why asynchronous nature of standard replication solution is causing problems with it. Lets first think about properties of simple components we fail over – web servers, application servers etc. We [...]

The Math of Automated Failover

There are number of people recently blogging about MySQL automated failover, based on production incident which GitHub disclosed. Here is my take on it. When we look at systems providing high availability we can identify 2 cases of system breaking down. First is when the system itself has a bug or limitations which does not [...]

How to lag a slave behind to avoid a disaster

MySQL Replication is useful and easy to setup. It is used for very different purposes. For example: split read and writes run data mining or reporting processes on them disaster recovery Is important to mention that a replication server is not a backup by itself. A mistake on the master, for example a DROP DATABASE [...]

Percona XtraDB Cluster: Failure Scenarios with only 2 nodes

During the design period of a new cluster, it is always advised to have at least 3 nodes (this is the case with PXC but it’s also the same with PRM). But why and what are the risks ? The goal of having more than 2 nodes, in fact an odd number is recommended in [...]