Have you ever had to provision a large number of instances from a single backup? The most common use case is having to move to new hardware, but there are other scenarios as well. This kind of procedure can involve multiple backup/restore operations which can easily become a pain to administer. Let’s look at a potential way to make it easier using Percona Xtrabackup. The Percona XtraBackup tool provides a method of performing fast and reliable backups of your MySQL data while the system is running.

Leveraging Named Pipes

As per the Linux manual page, a FIFO special file (a named pipe) is similar to a pipe except that it is accessed as part of the filesystem. It can be opened by multiple processes for reading or writing.

For this …

We are excited to let you know about two upcoming changes to Percona XtraBackup which will align Percona XtraBackup Versions with Percona Server for MySQL.  These changes are to bring Percona XtraBackup release naming line with Percona Server and MySQL and ensure Percona XtraBackup executes complete backups.

The first is a change to the naming structure of releases.  This change is something we believe will help when working with Percona products and is designed to position Percona XtraBackup to be in sync with the current release naming strategy of Percona Server for MySQL and Percona XtraDB Cluster.

The current naming structure of …

Disclaimer: the following script only works for Percona Server for MySQL 5.7, and relies on enabling performance schema (PS) instrumentation which can add overhead on high concurrent systems, and is not intended for continuous production usage as it’s a POC (proof of concept).

Introduction

In Percona Support, we frequently receive tickets related to deadlocks and even though the deadlock concept is simple, troubleshooting might not be in all cases. 

As explained in How to Deal with MySQL Deadlocks, a deadlock occurs when two or more transactions mutually hold and request for locks, creating a cycle of dependencies. MySQL will detect deadlocks and kill one of the transactions (making it rollback), and the deadlock will be printed in SEIS (show engine innodb status). Limitations of using this approach …

In Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) versions prior to 1.5.0, there were two methods for upgrading PXC clusters, and both of these use built-in StatefulSet update strategies. The first one is manual (OnDelete update strategy) and the second one is semi-automatic (RollingUpdate strategy). Since the Kubernetes operator is about automating the database management, and there are use cases to always keep the database up to date, a new smart update strategy was implemented.

Smart Update Strategy

The smart update strategy can be used to enable automatic context-aware upgrades of PXC clusters between minor versions. One of the use cases for automatic upgrades is if you want to get security …

Rewriting a MySQL query for performance is an important process that every DBA should be aware of so they can fix the wrong queries on runtime without code changes on the application end. ProxySQL has great support for rewriting the queries, which Alkin Tezuysal already explored in his excellent blog ProxySQL Query Rewrite Use Case.

So far, MySQL community provides two built-in query rewrite plugins to perform this task. Recently they introduced the plugin “ddl_rewriter”.

• query rewriter plugin : It has support for INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE / REPLACE statements from MySQL 8.0.12. 
• ddl_rewritter plugin: It supports the CREATE TABLE statement. Introduced at MySQL 8.0.16.

In this blog, I am going to explain the complete process of the implementation and the …

At the Percona engineering team, we often receive requests to analyze changes in MySQL/Percona Server for MySQL behavior from one version to another, either due to regression or a bug fix (when having to point out to a customer that commit X has fixed their issue and upgrading to a version including that fix will solve their problem).

In this blog post, we will analyze the approach used to fix PS-7019 – Correct query results for LEFT JOIN with GROUP BY.

Each release comes with a lot of changes. For example, the difference between MySQL 8.0.19 to 8.0.20:

git diff mysql-8.0.19..mysql-8.0.20 | wc -l
737454
git diff mysql-8.0.19..mysql-8.0.20 --name-only | wc -l
4495

737K lines in 4495 files have changed from one minor version to another.

git …

Recently I had the opportunity to test a storage device from ScaleFlux called CSD 2000. In this blog post, I will share the results of using it to run MySQL in comparison with an Intel device that had a similar capacity.

First of all, why do we need another storage device? Why is ScaleFlux any different?

The answer is simple; it gives us built-in compression and atomic writes. For many workloads, but especially for database-type workloads, these are very important features.

Because of built-in compression, we can store more data on the ScaleFlux device than on a similar device with the same capacity.

Because of atomic writes, we can disable InnoDB Double Write buffer which means less writes/fsync on the disk layer. This should give us a performance advantage against non-atomic drives.

I ran many different tests on different data sizes, with different …

A small thing that provides a huge help.

The other day I was writing some code to process a very large amount of items coming from a social media API. My items were ending in a queue in MySQL and then needed to be processed and eventually moved.

The task was not so strange,  but what I have to do is to develop a queue processor.  Now when you need to process a queue you have two types of queue: static and dynamic.

The static comes in a batch of N number of items in a given time interval and is normally easier to process given you have a defined number of items that you can split in chunks and process in parallel.

The dynamic is… well… more challenging. One option is to wait to have a predefined number of items, and then process them as if they were a static queue.

But this approach is not very good, given it is possible that it will delay a lot …

I would say that innodb_rollback_on_timeout is a very important parameter. In this blog, I am going to explain “innodb_rollback_on_timeout” and how it affects the transaction behavior at the MySQL level. I describe two scenarios with practical tests, as it would be helpful to understand this parameter better.

What is innodb_rollback_on_timeout?

The parameter Innodb_rollback_on_timeout will control the behavior of the transaction when a failure occurs with timeout.

• If –innodb-rollback-on-timeout=OFF ( default ) is specified, InnoDB rollbacks only the last statement on a transaction timeout.
• If –innodb-rollback-on-timeout=ON is specified, a transaction timeout causes InnoDB to abort and roll back the entire transaction.

Let’s conduct the test with the …

On July 21, 2020, Percona delivered an updated version of our Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) focused on easing deployment and operations management of a clustered MySQL environment. Included in the Percona Distribution for MySQL, our Operator is based on the best practices for MySQL cluster configuration and setup in Kubernetes. This update adds a variety of important new features including:

Smart Update to Safely and Reliably Upgrade your PXC Environment Automatically
We implemented a new update strategy called Smart Update. Smart Update is aware of the context of your environment and minimizes the number of failover events that need to occur to fully upgrade a …