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 [...]
Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.0.5
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0.5 on January 23rd, 2012. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories. This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.0 series. New Features: New option –defaults-extra-file has been introduced. This option specifies from what extra file to read [...]
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 [...]
Backing up binary log files with mysqlbinlog
Backing up binary logs are essential part of creating good backup infrastructure as it gives you the possibility for point in time recovery. After restoring a database from backup you have the option to recover changes that happend after taking a backup. The problem with this approach was that you had to do periodic filesystem [...]
Bug#12704861
As Mark pointed out, there isn’t a lot of detail in the release notes about what could potentially be a very serious problem that is fixed in MySQL 5.1.60. I’ll repeat here the full documentation from the release notes: “InnoDB Storage Engine: Data from BLOB columns could be lost if the server crashed at a precise [...]
Improved InnoDB fast index creation
One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER TABLE [...]
Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep
Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]
Estimating Replication Capacity
It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to optimize your system when your replication runs [...]
How innodb_open_files affects performance
Recently I looked at table_cache sizing which showed larger table cache does not always provides the best performance. So I decided to look at yet another similar variable – innodb_open_files which defines how many files Innodb will keep open while working in innodb_file_per_table mode. Unlike MyISAM Innodb does not have to keep open file descriptor [...]
Improving InnoDB recovery time
Speed of InnoDB recovery is known and quite annoying problem. It was discussed many times, see: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=29847 http://dammit.lt/2008/10/26/innodb-crash-recovery/ This is problem when your InnoDB crashes, it may takes long time to start. Also it affects restoring from backup (both LVM and xtrabackup / innobackup) In this is simple test, I do crash mysql during in-memory [...]

