We’re always testing the latest versions of MySQL with most of the environments to make sure that we can find the critical issues before it goes to production. This wasn’t different with the 5.6 MySQL neither. We already started to play with this version in the summer. The first news were very promising. The performance gain is significant. However we have run into couple of errors. One of them was the

mysql_install_db problem with replicating environment

[root@hostname ~]# mysql_install_db --user=mysql --datadir=/mysql/data/

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Installing MySQL system tables...
121217 10:02:20 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled
121217 10:02:20 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins
121217 10:02:20 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.3
121217 10:02:20 InnoDB: Using Linux native AIO
121217 10:02:20 InnoDB: CPU supports crc32 instructions
121217 10:02:20 …

There are mistakes that drive you crazy when you try to understand what went wrong.

One of the most annoying and hard to catch was this, apparently harmless line:

tungsten-sandbox -m 5.5.24 --topology all-masters -n 2 -p 7300 -l 12300 -r 10300 –t $HOME/mm -d tsb-mm

The person reporting the error told me that the installation directory (indicated by "-t") was not taken into account.

I usually debug by examples, so I copied the line, and pasted it into one of my servers. Sure enough, the application did not take trat option into account. The installation kept happening in the default directory.

I knew that I had done a good job at making the application configurable, but I checked the code nonetheless. The only place where the default directory is mentioned is when the related variable is initialized. Throughout the code, there are no literal values used for this purpose. And yet, the …

I had to install Percona XtraDB Cluster, I think for the first time since it was announced stable. I remembered many problems I faced with beta releases, which was understandable given they were only for a preview, but this time I hoped for significant improvements.

I have to say I am generally quite sensitive about simple problems that could/should be easily discovered and corrected. Well, it didn’t take five minutes to see a few of such problems. These minutes I spent installing the database binaries from Percona Yum repository. It turned out that was enough to see a lot of errors for no reason. Not a good thing.

[..]
  Installing : 1:Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-server-5.5.23-23.5.333.rhel6.x86_64         5/5
ls: cannot access /var/lib/mysql/*.err: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access /var/lib/mysql/*.err: No such file or directory
[Note] Flashcache bypass: disabled

Why does it matter that ls: cannot access …

Do the operating systems kill your MySQL instances from time to time? Are some database servers swapping constantly? These are relatively common problems. Why? How to prevent them?

Memory allocation

When a running program needs some additional memory, it can typically allocate it dynamically with malloc() function. It finds an unused continuous block that is at least as large as the requested size, reserves as much as it needs, and returns a pointer to that space. No initialization of the memory contents is performed at the time. When malloc() returns NULL instead of a valid address, it is an information to the calling program that there wasn’t enough memory available and the call has failed to allocate anything. In such cases applications typically take appropriate actions to notify users about the problem and terminate some of their activity or completely shut down.

In Linux it can be a little bit …

XtraBackup is a great piece of software from Percona, which allows creating (nearly) lock-less MySQL/InnoDB backups. The tool has been around for quite some time and recently even received a major version bump. I have relied on it many times over the years. As it turns out, using it in some configurations may lead to heavy swapping or prevent MySQL from running queries.

So far I only kept complaining about the wrapper script XtraBackup has been distributed with and which was taken from Oracle’s InnoDB Hot Backup. The infamous innobackupex-1.5.1 was neither well written, nor was it even fully compatible with the XtraBackup’s feature set. This sometimes led to weird problems where there should not be any.

This time the problem can appear elsewhere. Mostly when one using the tool does not understand how it works in certain circumstances.

How does XtraBackup work?

In a few short words. XtraBackup …

Background Knowledge

You try starting, stopping or connecting to MySQL and receive the following error, “Error: Found option without preceding group in config file: /etc/mysql/conf.d/char_collation_set.cnf at line: 1″. The error message my vary but comes to the same issue. MySQL may not start or might experience connectivity issues.

This issue was experienced on Debian Squeeze v6.04 AMD64 system with MySQL v14.14 Distrib 5.1.61.

Solution

This issue is caused by a improperly formatted MySQL configuration file(s) and refers to one missing the group heading (e.g. [mysqld], [mysqld_safe], etc.).

Source: MySQL 5.1 Reference Manual :: 4.2.3.3. Using Option Files
Source: …

No space left on device – this can happen to anyone. Sooner or later you may face the situation where a database either has already or is only minutes away from running out of disk space. What many people do in such cases, they just start looking for semi-random things to remove – perhaps a backup, a few older log files, or pretty much anything that seems redundant. However this means acting under a lot of stress and without much thinking, so it would be great if there was a possibility to avoid that. Often there is. Or what if there isn’t anything to remove?

While xfs is usually the recommended filesystem for a MySQL data partition on Linux, the extended filesystem family continues to be very popular as it is used as default in all major Linux distributions. There is a feature specific to ext3 and ext4 that can help the goal of resolving the full disk situation.

…

MySQL 5.1 or newer can sometimes start throwing a strange message into an error log. The message states that a query was unsafe for binary logging along with some additional information. What does it mean? Is it a problem?

From time to time you might spot MySQL error log filling with the following warning:

“[Warning] Unsafe statement written to the binary log using statement format since BINLOG_FORMAT = STATEMENT. The statement is unsafe because it uses a LIMIT clause. This is unsafe because the set of rows included cannot be predicted. Statement: DELETE FROM score WHERE user_id = 12345 AND created = ’2012-04-15′ LIMIT 1″

If binary logging is enabled and the log format is set to STATEMENT, MySQL generates such message when it considers that a query is ambiguous and could behave differently each time it executes against the same data set. Such situation could happen, for example, on a …

When an application runs a query in MySQL, from time to time, it may receive various errors. Some are related to syntax errors in the query text itself, some occur because the statement attempted an illegal operation such as for example writing a duplicate value into a column with unique constraint. But there are a few that are not as easy to figure out, because they have no direct relationship with the actual work being done. One of such error messages reads “Lost connection to MySQL server during query”. What does it actually mean? If it appears frequently, how to diagnose what the problem may be?

The first thing to know about the “Lost connection to MySQL server during query” message is that this is not a MySQL error. It is a MySQL client error. The difference may seem subtle, but it is significant. A MySQL error would be a problem reported by database server, i.e. handling a query did not succeed, because the …

When I install a MySQL package using MySQL Sandbox, if everything goes smoothly, I get an informative message on standard output, and I keep working.

This is OK

$HOME/opt/mysql/5.5.15/scripts/mysql_install_db --no-defaults \
  --user=$USER --basedir=$HOME/opt/mysql/5.5.15 \
  --datadir=$HOME/sandboxes/msb_5_5_15/data \
  --lower_case_table_names=2
Installing MySQL system tables...
OK
Filling help tables...
OK

To start mysqld at boot time you have to copy
support-files/mysql.server to the right place for your system

PLEASE REMEMBER TO SET A PASSWORD FOR THE MySQL root USER !
To do so, start the server, then issue the following commands:

/Users/gmax/opt/mysql/5.5.15/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
/Users/gmax/opt/mysql/5.5.15/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h gmac4.local password 'new-password'

Alternatively you can run: …