May 23, 2013

MySQL Backup tools used by Percona Remote DBA for MySQL

As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic [...]

MySQL Wish for 2013 – Better Memory Accounting

With Performance Schema improvements in MySQL 5.6 I think we’re in the good shape with insight on what is causing performance bottlenecks as well as where CPU resources are spent. (Performance Schema does not accounts CPU usage directly but it is something which can be relatively easily derived from wait and stage information). Where we’re [...]

MySQL caching methods and tips

“The least expensive query is the query you never run.” Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding [...]

High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 6 – Publishing server location

This post is the sixth of a series that started here. From the previous posts of this series, we now have an HA MySQL service running on EC2. We now need to find a way to point the web servers or application servers to the HA MySQL service. Normally, in an HA setup, this is [...]

High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 5 – The instance monitoring script

This post is the fifth of a series that started here. From the previous posts of this series, we now have nearly everything setup, only a few pieces are missing. One of the missing pieces is the Pacemaker script that run on the MySQL instance.

High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 5 – The instance monitoring script

This post is the fifth of a series that started here. From the previous posts of this series, we now have an instance restart script that can restart the database node in case of failure and automatically reconfigure Pacemaker and the other servers that needs to access the MySQL server. What we will cover in [...]

Introducing tcprstat, a TCP response time tool

Ignacio Nin and I (mostly Ignacio) have worked together to create tcprstat[1], a new tool that times TCP requests and prints out statistics on them. The output looks somewhat like vmstat or iostat, but we’ve chosen the statistics carefully so you can compute meaningful things about your TCP traffic. What is this good for? In [...]

High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 4 – The instance restart script

This post is the fourth of a series that started here. From the previous of this series, we now have resources configured but instead of starting MySQL, Pacemaker invokes a script to start (or restart) the EC2 instance running MySQL. This blog post describes the instance restart script. Remember, I am more a DBA than [...]

High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 2 – Setting up the initial instances

This post is the second of a series that started here. The first step to build the HA solution is to create two working instances, configure them to be EBS based and create a security group for them. A third instance, the client, will be discussed in part 7. Since this will be a proof [...]

High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 1 – Intro

Like many, I have been seduced by the power and flexibility of Amazon EC2. Being able to launch new instances at will depending on the load, is almost too good to be true. Amazon has also some drawbacks, availability is not guaranteed and discovery protocols relying on Ethernet broadcast or multicast cannot be used. That [...]