May 21, 2013

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 [...]

Recovering Linux software RAID, RAID5 Array

Dealing with MySQL you might need to deal with RAID recovery every so often. Sometimes because of client lacking the proper backup or sometimes because recovering RAID might improve recovery, for example you might get point in time recovery while backup setup only takes you to the point where last binary log was backed up. [...]

MySQL performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS

A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts [...]

Reasons for MySQL Replication Lag

One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks

In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Theory

Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at [...]

Spreading .ibd files across multiple disks; the optimization that isn’t

Inspired by Baron’s earlier post, here is one I hear quite frequently – “If you enable innodb_file_per_table, each table is it’s own .ibd file.  You can then relocate the heavy hit tables to a different location and create symlinks to the original location.” There are a few things wrong with this advice:

Webinar: Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup

We’ve had such a large number of signups to our Migrating MyISAM to InnoDB webinar, that we decided to hold one more before the year is out: December, 8th 9AM PST: Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup.

fsyncs on software raid on FusionIO

As soon as we get couple FusionIO cards, there is question how to join them in single space for database. FusionIO does not provide any mirroring/stripping solutions and totally relies on OS tools there. So for Linux we have software RAID and LVM, I tried to followup on my post How many fsync / sec [...]