Percona Toolkit’s pt-table-checksum is a great tool to find data inconsistencies between a MySQL master and its replicas. However it is sometimes not enough to know that there are inconsistencies and let pt-table-sync fix the issue: you may want to know which exact rows are different to identify the statements that created the inconsistency. This post shows one way to achieve that goal.

The issue

Let’s assume you have 2 servers running MySQL 5.5: db1 the master and db2 the replica. You want to upgrade to MySQL 5.6 using an in-place upgrade and to play safe, you will upgrade db2 (the slave) first. If all goes well you will promote it and upgrade db1.

A good thing to do after upgrading db2 is to check for potential data …

Percona Toolkit’s  pt-table-checksum performs an online replication consistency check by executing checksum queries on the master, which produces different results on replicas that are inconsistent with the master – and the tool pt-table-sync synchronizes data efficiently between MySQL tables.

The tools by default use the CRC32. Other good choices include MD5 and SHA1. If you have installed the FNV_64 user-defined function, pt-table-sync will detect it and prefer to use it, because it is much faster than the built-ins. You can also use …

I recently encountered a situation in which after running Percona Toolkit’s pt-table-checksum on a customer system, 95% of the table on the MySQL master was different on the MySQL slave. Although this table was not a critical part of the infrastructure, from time to time, writes to the table from the master would break replication. Additionally, this table has about 6 million rows, and running pt-table-sync would take sometime. Rebuilding the slave from backup of the master would not be an easy option as well since the slave acts as an archive where it has a lot more data than the master.

So how did we solve it? With pt-online-schema-change and a NOOP ALTER.

pt-online-schema-change --alter 'ENGINE=INNODB' D=dbname,t=tblname

How is it …