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 [...]
Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO
August 28, 2012 By 3 Comments
Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Multi-node writing and Unexpected deadlocks
August 17, 2012 By 17 Comments
Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and the technology it uses (Galera) is an exciting alternative to traditional MySQL replication. For those who don’t know, it gives you: Fully Synchronous replication with a write latency increase equivalent to a ping RTT to the furthest node Automatic cluster synchronization, both incremental and full restores The ability to read [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
June 20, 2012 By 63 Comments
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
InnoDB’s gap locks
March 27, 2012 By 15 Comments
One of the most important features of InnoDB is the row level locking. This feature provides better concurrency under heavy write load but needs additional precautions to avoid phantom reads and to get a consistent Statement based replication. To accomplish that, row level locking databases also acquire gap locks. What is a Phantom Read A [...]
How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins
February 22, 2012 By 11 Comments
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 [...]
Can we improve MySQL variable handling ?
February 18, 2012 By 8 Comments
MySQL Settings (also known as Server Variables) have interesting property. When you set variable in running server this change is not persisted in any way and server will be back to old value upon restart. MySQL also does not have option to re-read config file without restarting as some other software so approach to change [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster Feature 2: Multi-Master replication
January 19, 2012 By 22 Comments
This is about the second great feature – Multi-Master replication, what you get with Percona XtraDB Cluster. It is recommended you get familiar with general architecture of the cluster, described on the previous post. By Multi-Master I mean the ability to write to any node in your cluster and do not worry that eventually you [...]
How Does Semisynchronous MySQL Replication Work?
January 19, 2012 By 24 Comments
With the recent release of Percona XtraDB Cluster, I am increasingly being asked about MySQL’s semi-synchronous replication. I find that there are often a number of misconceptions about how semi-synchronous replication really works. I think it is very important to understand what guarantees you actually get with semi-synchronous replication, and what you don’t get. The [...]
Configuring MySQL For High Number of Connections per Second
January 6, 2012 By 23 Comments
One thing I noticed during the observation was that there were roughly 2,000 new connections to MySQL per second during peak times. This is a high number by any account. When a new connection to MySQL is made, it can go into the back_log, which effectively serves as a queue for new connections on operating [...]
