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 [...]
Read/Write Splitting with PHP Webinar Questions Followup
Today I gave a presentation on “Read/Write Splitting with PHP” for Percona Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as I could during the session, but here are [...]
Be productive with the MySQL command line
Even if you are using a GUI tool to connect to your MySQL servers, one day or another, you will have to deal with the command line. So it is nice to know a few tips that can really make your work easier. Note: The commands below are only available for Unix/Linux. Using pager Most [...]
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 [...]
devops webinar – follow up Q&A
First I wanted to thanks all the attendees and for the nice comments I got. As promised during the webinar, these are the answers of the questions you asked. Q: Does Percona provide plugin for cacti? A: Yes we do. They are part of Percona Monitoring Plugins. You can see some examples here. Q: What [...]
Replaying database load with Percona Playback
If you are planning to upgrade or make any configuration change on your MySQL database the first advice usually is: – Benchmark! How should we do that benchmark? People usually run generic benchmark tools like sysbench, tpcc or mysqlslap that are good to know the number of transactions per seconds that a database can do [...]
Recovery deleted ibdata1
Recently I had a case when a customer deleted the InnoDB main table space – ibdata1 – and redo logs – ib_logfile*. MySQL keeps InnoDB files open all the time. The following recovery technique is based on this fact and it allowed to salvage the database. Actually, the files were deleted long time ago – [...]
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 [...]
Best kept MySQLDump Secret
Many people use mysqldump –single-transaction to get consistent backup for their Innodb tables without making database read only. In most cases it works, but did you know there are some cases when you can get table entirely missing from the backup if you use this technique ? The problem comes from the fact how MySQL’s [...]

