Like Ovais said in Implications of Metadata Locking Changes in MySQL 5.5, the hot topic these days is MySQL 5.6, but there was an important metadata locking change in MySQL 5.5. As I began to dig into the Percona Toolkit bug he reported concerning this change apropos pt-online-schema-change, I discovered something about lock_wait_timeout that shocked me. From the [...]
MySQL 5.5 lock_wait_timeout: patience is a virtue, and a locked server
Percona Welcomes MySQL 5.6!
MySQL 5.6 was made generally available as a production-ready solution earlier this month. This release comes about 2 years after MySQL 5.5 was released, but MySQL 5.6 contains improvements started long before that – for example, work on the Innodb Full Text Search project was started over 6 years ago, in addition with many optimizer [...]
CentOS 5.8 users: your UTF-8 data is in peril with Perl MySQL
CentOS 5.8 and earlier use Perl module DBD::mysql v3.0007 which has a bug that causes Perl not to flag UTF-8 data as being UTF-8. Presuming that the MySQL table/column is using UTF-8, and the Perl MySQL connection is also using UTF-8, then a correct system returns: PV = 0x9573840 "\343\203\213 \303\250"\0 [UTF8 "\x{30cb} \x{e8}"] That’s a Devel::Peek inside a Perl scalar variable which [...]
Solving RPM installation conflicts in CentOS 5 and CentOS 6
Lately we’ve had many reports of the RPM packages for CentOS 5 (mostly) and CentOS 6 having issues when installing different combinations of our products, particularly with Percona Toolkit for MySQL. Examples of bugs related to these issues are lp:1031427 and lp:1051874. These problems arise when trying to install a package from the distribution that [...]
Analyzing Slow Query Table in MySQL 5.6
Next week I’m teaching an online Percona Training class, called Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit. This is a guided tour of best practices for pt-query-digest, the best tool for evaluating where your database response time is being spent. This month we saw the GA release of MySQL 5.6, and I wanted to check if any [...]
Using MySQL Sandbox with Percona Server
One of the most useful tools if you’re working with multiple versions of MySQL Servers is MySQL Sandbox which allows you to maintain many different versions of MySQL, Percona Server, MariaDB. If you’re just working with single sandbox you can just use MySQL Sandbox in its most basic way and it will work:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 | root@smt2:~/sandboxes# make_sandbox /tmp/Percona-Server-5.5.29-rel29.4-401.Linux.x86_64.tar.gz unpacking /tmp/Percona-Server-5.5.29-rel29.4-401.Linux.x86_64.tar.gz Executing low_level_make_sandbox --basedir=/tmp/5.5.29 \ --sandbox_directory=msb_5_5_29 \ --install_version=5.5 \ --sandbox_port=5529 \ --no_ver_after_name \ --my_clause=log-error=msandbox.err ... no_run = no_show = do you agree? ([Y],n) Y loading grants ... sandbox server started Your sandbox server was installed in $HOME/sandboxes/msb_5_5_29 |
However [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 is ready
About a month ago, we held a bug raffle for Percona Toolkit 2.1.9. The turnout was good and the resulting release is worth upgrading to, especially if you were affected by the backwards-incompatible changes to pt-heartbeat in 2.1.8. Here are the release notes for Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 which highlight the bugs fixed: Percona Toolkit 2.1.9 has been released. [...]
Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.0.2 release: enterprise-grade MySQL monitoring and graphing capabilities
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.0.2 — high-quality components to add enterprise-grade MySQL monitoring and graphing capabilities to your existing in-house, on-premises monitoring solutions. The components are designed to integrate seamlessly with widely deployed solutions such as Nagios and Cacti, and are delivered in the form of templates, plugins, [...]
Adventures in archiving
One of our Remote DBA service clients recently had an issue with size on disk for a particular table; in short this table was some 25 million rows of application audit data with an on disk size of 345GB recorded solely for the purposes of debugging which may or may not occur. Faced with the task of [...]
How to create/restore a slave using GTID replication in MySQL 5.6
MySQL 5.6 is GA! Now we have new things to play with and in my personal opinion the most interesting one is the new Global Transaction ID (GTID) support in replication. This post is not an explanation of what is GTID and how it works internally because there are many documents about that: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/replication-gtids-concepts.html One [...]

