The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 is almost 1 month away. It's time to start planning, set the expectations, and decide what to attend. This post will give a roundup of some of the sessions that I recommend attending and I look forward to.

First, the unexpected!

After much talk and disbelief, here they come! Oracle (http://www.mysql.com) engineers will participate to the Percona Live conference. This is wonderful! Their participation was requested by the organizers, by the attendees, and by community advocates, who all told the Oracle management how important it is to be in this conference. Finally, they have

This week I was given the task of repopulating our entire primary database cluster.  This was due to an alter that had to be performed on our largest table.  It was easiest to run it on one host and populate the dataset from that host everywhere.

I recalled a while back reading a blog post from Tumblr about how to chain a copy to multiple hosts using a combination of nc, tar, and pigz.  I used this, with a few other things to greatly speed up our repopulation process.  As I was repopulating production servers, I did a combination of raw data copy and xtrabackup streams across our servers, depending on the position in our replication setup.

For a normal straight copy, here’s what I did:

On the last host, configure netcat to listen and then

For the past many years, there’s been a conference in April, at the Santa Clara Convention Centre where the topic has been MySQL and the surrounding ecosystem. The first year I went, I gave a talk on the new features in MySQL Cluster 5.1 to a overflowing room of attendees. For me, it’s an event that’s mixed with speaking about something I’ve been working on and talking to other attendees about everything from how a particular part of the server works to where we can escape to for nearby good vegan food.

So, I thought I’d share some of the sessions that I’m really looking forward to. My selection is probably atypical, but may be interesting to others. I’m not going to list the

I know, I haven’t been posting much lately. 5.5 upgrades got postponed due to the new storage platform needing my immediate attention and being a speaker at the Percona Live conference in April also needs a lot of attention.

One of the things I want to try out is running multiple MySQL instances on the same machine. The concept remained in the back of my mind ever since I attended Ryan Thiessen’s presentation on the MySQL conference 2011 but we never actually got a proper usecase for it. Well, with the new storage platform it would be really beneficial so an excellent use case to try it out! So what have I been

If you need Xtrabackup for Solaris 10 and 11 (x64), you can download it from the link on the following page:

xtrabackup-solaris10_x86_64

Fwiw, we needed this for a server, and it’s not a standard package available for download, so I just wanted to make this available to all.

(Sorry if you’ve read this for a third time, and for the double link – I think the planet mysql feed might reject posts with direct ftp links.)

Hope this helps.

First of all, I wish you a happy new year.
Many things happened last year, it was really exciting to be involved in the MySQL ecosystem.
I hope this enthusiasm will be increased this year, up to you !

To start the year, I propose the MySQL[plus] Awards 2011
It will only take 5 minutes to fill out these polls.
Answer with your heart first and then with your experience with some of these tools or services.

Polls will be closed January 31, so, vote now !
For “other” answers, please,  let me a comment with details.

Don’t hesitate to submit proposal for tools or services in the comments.

So I’m back from the Percona dev team’s recent meeting.  While there, we spent a fair bit of time discussing Xtrabackup development.  One of our challenges is that as we add richer features to the tool, we need equivalent testing capabilities.  However, it seems a constant in the MySQL world that available QA tools often leave something to be desired.  The randgen is a literal wonder-tool for database testing, but it is also occasionally frustrating / doesn’t scratch every testing itch.  It is based on technology SQL Server was using in 1998 (MySQL began using it in ~2007, IIRC).  So this is no knock, it is merely meant to be an example of a poor QA engineer’s frustrations ; )  While the current

We wanted to optimize and test backups for one of our new large scale setup before we could finalize on the backup plan. Our challenge was the data volume was almost 30x more than our normal volumes. Since this involved large volume of data we thought this might be a good candidate to test incremental backups. We wrote a wrapper script to save the states between full backups and incremental backups and did some tests with smaller data sets. It worked perfectly fine. The version of xtrabackup we were testing was 1.6.2.

The incremental backups were completing well within 30minutes. We set out to test what would happen if the amount of incremental diff was large. While doing this test, we started getting backup failures with the following error

20110726_225312.log-110727 00:56:10 innobackupex: Starting to backup .frm, .MRG, .MYD,

On many of our clients, we have a need to run XtraBackup as a regular OS user. Aside from running into the issue where tar4ibd was not provided with Percona’s xtrabackup-1.6.2.tar.gz package, our main issues have been with permissions when attempting a streaming backup.

I have found the following:

I have just upgraded the xtrabackup bazaar code repositories to the 2a format. This means that bzr 1.16 is required to access the source code repositories now.

If you get an error like the one below when working with a local branch, you’ll need to run “bzr upgrade” in it (see below for example). For branches on launchpad, you can use the web UI and hit the “upgrade branch” button.

stewart@willster:~/src/percona-xtrabackup$ bzr pull
Using saved parent location: bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/%2Bbranch/percona-xtrabackup/
Doing on-the-fly conversion from RemoteRepositoryFormat(_network_name='Bazaar repository format 2a (needs bzr 1.16 or later)\n') to RepositoryFormatKnitPack1().
This may take some time. Upgrade the repositories to the same format for better performance.
bzr: ERROR:

With this revision, My xtrabackup branch has been merged into trunk.

What does this mean? It means that we now get a drizzlebackup.innobase binary which is the xtrabackup port for Drizzle. Exciting times.

Follow it over on launchpad.

After having fixed an incredibly odd compiler warning (and with -Werror that we build with, error) on OSX (die die die) – xtrabackup for Drizzle is ready to be merged. This will bring it into our next milestone: freemont. Over the next few weeks you should see some good tests merged in for backup and restore too.

While not final final, I’m thinking that the installed binary name will be drizzlebackup.innobase. A simple naming scheme for various backup tools that are Drizzle specific. This casually pre-empts a drizzlebackup tool that can co-ordinate all of these (like the innobackupex script).

For backups, historically in the MySQL world you’ve had mysqldump (a SQL dump, means on restore you have to rebuild indexes), InnoDB Hot Backup (proprietary, but takes a copy of the InnoDB data files, so restore is much quicker), LVM snapshots (various scripts exist, does have larger IO impact, requires LVM) and more recently xtrabackup. Xtrabackup essentially does the same thing as InnoDB hot backup except that it’s free and open source software.

Many people have been using xtrabackup successfully for quite a while now.

In Drizzle7, our default storage engine is InnoDB. There have been a few changes, but it is totally InnoDB. This leaves us with the question of backup solutions. We have drizzledump (the Drizzle equivalent to MySQL dump – although with fewer gotchas), you could always use LVM snapshots and the probability of Oracle

Big data is a big problem for growing SaaS businesses and large web applications. In this webinar, we'll teach you how to set up Percona Server, XtraBackup, and Tungsten to manage Terabyte+ databases and scale to millions of transactions a day. We'll discuss the latest features for high transaction performance like InnoDB buffer pool dump/restore and HandlerSocket, our favorite tricks for backup, restore, and provisioning of large data sets, and how to replicate scalably and safely using Tungsten Replicator with parallel apply.

The open-source xtrabackup tool from Percona brings much needed hot backup functionality to MySQL deployments.  In this database journal article we discuss logical, cold, and hot backups, then explain how to use xtrabackup on your MyISAM, InnoDB, and XtraDB tables to create at-the-ready backups.  We then take you through the step-by-step process to restore them, and even the process of point-in-time recovery too.

Database Journal – Hotbackups with Percona’s Xtrabackup

There’s lots of buzz lately about the so-called “open-core” business model of Marten Mickos’s new employer. But this is nothing new. Depending on how you define it, InnoDB is “open-core,” and has been for a long time. The InnoDB Hot Backup (ibbackup) tool was always closed-source. Did anyone ever cry foul and claim that this made InnoDB itself not open-source, or accuse Innobase / Oracle of masquerading as open-source? I don’t recall that happening, although sometimes people got suspicious about the interplay between the backup tool and the storage engine. Generally, though, the people I know who use InnoDB Hot Backup have no gripes about paying for it.

What is the

Whether you’re working with MySQL, MySQL Cluster, or any other RDBMS, every database with a requirement for persistent data should always have a backup. As a Production DBA you’re the insurance policy to safeguard the data. Bad things do happen. Backups are your safety net to ensure you always have a way to recover should the worst happen and the database becomes irreparable.

There are many ways to produce a consistent backup of MySQL, I have listed a few of the options available below; Remember backups are your safety net, failing to retrieve a consistent backup when you need it most can be a very career limiting move, so no matter what backup method you choose always test your backups!

Logical Backups
The ever popular mysqldump is a

OpenSQLCamp was a huge success! I took videos of most of the sessions (we only had 3 video cameras, and 4 rooms, and 2 sessions were not recorded). Unfortunately, I was busy doing administrative stuff for opensqlcamp for the opening keynote and first 15 minutes of the session organizing, and when I got to the planning board, it was already full….so I was not able to give a session.

• Comparing Non-Relational Databases: MongoDB, Tokyo Tyrant, CouchDB by Igal Koshevoy of Pragmaticraft
• Drizzle Client Rewrite – Clark Boylan leads the requirements and design discussion for rewriting the Drizzle Client
• Drizzle Plugin

Last night at the Boston MySQL User Group I presented on how to get a consistent snapshot to build a slave, how to use mk-table-checksum to check for differences between masters and slaves on an ongoing basis, and how to use tools such as mk-table-sync and mysqldump to sync the data if there are any discrepancies.

The slides are online at http://technocation.org/files/doc/slave_sync.pdf.

The video can be watched on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un0wqYKmbWY or directly in your browser with the embedded player below:

Firstly, I have to thank my co-workers Singer Wang and Gerry Narvaja for doing a lot of the work that resulted in this comparison.

After running both InnoDB Hot Backup and Xtrabackup, we have found that there is a measurable but not large difference between the resources that Xtrabackup and InnoDB Hot Backup consume.

Xtrabackup:

• Free


• takes 1.1% longer (2 min during a 3 hour backup)


• uses 1.4% more space (1G more in a 70G backup — this was for uncompressed backups)


• uses 1.115% more cpu overall


• split as 0.12% user, 0.66% nice, 0.025% system, 0.31% more iowait,

Recently while we were building a slave with a newer version of MySQL 5.1 from an InnoDB Hot backup, the following error occurred when we ran mysql_upgrade:

mysql.time_zone                                    OK
mysql.time_zone_leap_second                        OK
mysql.time_zone_name                               OK
mysql.time_zone_transition                         OK
mysql.time_zone_transition_type                    OK
mysql.user                                         OK
Running 'mysql_fix_privilege_tables'...
ERROR 13 (HY000) at line 311: Can't get stat of './mysql/general_log.CSV' (Errcode: 2)
ERROR 13 (HY000) at line 316: Can't get stat of './mysql/slow_log.CSV' (Errcode: 2)
FATAL ERROR: Upgrade failed

The problem is that in MySQL 5.1, it is possible to log the slow query log and general log to tables in the mysql schema