I log into a lot of different servers running MySQL and one of the first things I do is create a file in my home directory called ‘.my.cnf’ with my credentials to that local mysql instance:

[client]
user=root
password=secret

This means I don’t have to type my password in every time, nor am I tempted to include it on the command line with -p and get the dreaded (but completely accurate):

Warning: Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.

MySQL 5.6 introduces a utility to make this easier and more secure. First, let’s start with a new mysqld instance with a blank root password and make it more secure:

[vagrant@localhost ~]$ mysqladmin -u root password
New password:secret
Confirm new password:secret
[vagrant@localhost ~]$ mysql -u root
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user …

Join me online next week (September 10 at 10 a.m. PDT) for my live webinar on Migrating to Percona XtraDB Cluster.  This was a popular webinar that I gave a few years ago, so I’m doing it again with updates for Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 (PXC) and all the latest in the Galera world.

This webinar will be really good for people interested in getting an overview of what PXC/Galera is, what it would take to adopt it for your application, and some of the differences and challenges it brings compared with a conventional MySQL Master/slave setup.  I’d highly suggest attending if you are considering Galera in your environment …

I was talking with a Percona Support customer earlier this week who was looking for Galera data on Percona Cloud Tools. (Percona Cloud Tools, now in free beta, is a hosted service providing access to query performance insights for all MySQL uses.)

The customer mentioned they were already keeping track of some Galera stats on Cacti, and given they were inclined to use Percona Cloud Tools more and more, they wanted to know if it was already supporting Percona XtraDB Cluster. My answer was: “No, not yet: you can install agents in each node (the regular way in the first node, then …

I was talking with a Percona Support customer earlier this week who was looking for Galera data on Percona Cloud Tools. (Percona Cloud Tools, now in free beta, is a hosted service providing access to query performance insights for all MySQL uses.)

The customer mentioned they were already keeping track of some Galera stats on Cacti, and given they were inclined to use Percona Cloud Tools more and more, they wanted to know if it was already supporting Percona XtraDB Cluster. My answer was: “No, not yet: you can install agents in each node (the regular way in the first node, then …

I was interested to hear about semi-sync replication improvements in MySQL’s 5.7.4 DMR release and decided to check it out.  I previously blogged about poor semi-sync performance and was pretty disappointed from semi-sync’s performance across WAN distances back then, particularly with many client threads.

The Test

The basic environment of these tests was:

• AWS EC2 m3.medium instances
• Master in us-east-1, slave in us-west-1 (~78ms ping RTT)
• CentOS 6.5
• innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1
• sync_binlog=1
• Semi-sync replication plugin installed and enabled.
• GTID’s enabled (except on 5.5)
• sysbench 0.5 update_index.lua test, 60 seconds, 250k table size.
• MySQL 5.7 was …

I’ve had the opportunity to train lots of people on Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) over the last few years the product has existed.  This has taken the form of phone calls, emails, blog posts, webinars, and consulting engagements. This doesn’t count all the time I’ve spent grilling Codership on how things actually work.  But it has culminated in the PXC tutorial I have given annually at Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California for the last two years.  Baron even attended this year and had this say:

“Jay Janssen’s tutorial on Percona …

Overview

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 has been GA for several months now and people are thinking more and more about moving from 5.5 to 5.6. Most people don’t want to upgrade all at once, but would prefer a rolling upgrade to avoid downtime and ensure 5.6 is behaving in a stable fashion before putting all of production on it. The official guide to a rolling upgrade can be found in the PXC 5.6 manual. This blog post will attempt to summarize the basic process.

However, there are a few caveats to trying to do a rolling 5.6 upgrade from 5.5:

1. If you mix Galera 2 and Galera 3 nodes, you must set wsrep_provider_options=”socket.checksum=1″ on the Galera 3 nodes for backwards …

Whither your rollback plan?

MySQL 5.6 upgrades are in full swing these days and knowing how to safely upgrade from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6 is important. When upgrading a replication environment, it’s important that you can build a migration plan that safely allows for your upgrade with minimal risk — rollback is often a very important component to this.

For many people this means upgrading slaves first and then the master.  The strategy of an older master replicating to a newer slave is well known and has been supported in MySQL replication for a very long time.  To be specific:  you can have a MySQL 5.6 slave of a 5.5 master and this should work fine until you upgrade your master and/or promote one of the slaves to be the master.

However, there are those of us who like to live on the edge and do …

Thanks to all who attended my webinar yesterday.  The slides and recording are available on the webinar’s page.  I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of questions that came in and I’ll try to answer them the best I can here.

Q: Does Percona XtraDB Cluster support writing to multiple master?

Yes, it does.  However, locks are not held on all nodes while a transaction is in progress, so there is a possibility for conflicts between simultaneous writes on different nodes.  Certification is the process that Galera uses to protect your data integrity, and the problem is pushed back to the application to handle in the form of deadlock errors.   As long as you understand this and the conditions where you may see more deadlocks (and your application can properly handle them), multi-node …

I’ve been blogging a lot about some of the new things you can expect with Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 and Galera 3.x – and GA is coming …