In this blog post, we’ll look at how “operator error” can cause serious problems (like the one we saw last week with AWS), and how to avoid them in MySQL using

--i-am-a-dummy

.

Recently, AWS had some serious downtime in their East region, which they explained as the consequence of a bad deployment. It seems like most of the Internet was affected in one way or another. Some on Twitter dubbed it “S3 Dependency Awareness Day.”

Since the outage, many companies (especially Amazon!) are reviewing their production access and deployment procedures. It would be a lie if I claimed I’ve never made a mistake in production. In fact, I would be afraid of working with someone who claims to have never made a mistake in a production environment.

Making a mistake or two is how you learn to have a full sense …

UPDATE: Some of the language in the original post was considered overly-critical of Oracle by some community members. This was not my intent, and I’ve modified the language to be less so. I’ve also changed term “synchronous” (which the use of is inaccurate and misleading) to “virtually synchronous.” This term is more accurate and already used by both technologies’ founders, and should be less misleading.

I also wanted to thank Jean-François Gagné for pointing out the incorrect sentence about multi-threaded slaves in Group Replication, which I also corrected accordingly.

In today’s blog post, I will briefly compare two major virtually synchronous replication technologies available today for MySQL.

More Than Asynchronous Replication

…

In this blog, we’ll discuss how to use concurrency to help with WAN latency when using synchronous clusters.

WAN Latency Problem

Our customers often ask us for help or advice with WAN clustering problems. Historically, the usual solution for MySQL WAN deployments is having the primary site in one data center, and stand-by backup site in another data center (replicating from the primary asynchronously). These days, however, there is a huge desire to employ available synchronous replication solutions for MySQL. These solutions include things like Galera (i.e., Percona XtraDB Cluster) or the recently released MySQL Group Replication. This trend is attributable to the fact that these solutions are less problematic and provide more automatic fail over and fail back procedures. But it’s also because businesses want to write in both data centers simultaneously.

Unfortunately, WAN link reliability and latency makes …

In this blog, we’ll look at how to manually build Percona Server for MySQL RPM packages.

Several customers and other people from the open source community have asked us how they could make their own Percona Server for MySQL RPM binaries from scratch.

This request is often made by companies that want to add custom patches to our release. To do this, you need to make some modifications to the

percona-server.spec

 file in the source tree, and some preparation is necessary.

This post covers how you can make your own RPMs from GIT or source tarball so that you can build RPMs from your own modified branch, or by applying patches. In this example, we’ll build Percona Server 5.7.16-10.

Making your own RPMs is not a recommended practice, and should rarely be …

This blog discusses how to prepare your database for the new leap second coming in the new year.

At the end of this year, on December 31, 2016, a new leap second gets added. Many of us remember the huge problems this caused back in 2012. Some of our customers asked how they should prepare for this year’s event to avoid any unexpected problems.

It’s a little late, but I thought discussing the issue might still be useful.

The first thing is to make sure your systems avoid the issue with abnormally high CPU usage. This was an problem in 2012 due to a Linux kernel bug. After the leap second was added, CPU utilization sky-rocketed on many systems, taking down …

Using Vault with MySQL

In my previous post I discussed using GPG to secure your database credentials. This relies on a local copy of your MySQL client config, but what if you want to keep the credentials stored safely along with other super secret information? Sure, GPG could still be used, but there must be an easier way to do this.

This post will look at a way to use Vault to store your credentials in a central location and use them to access your database. For those of you that have not yet come across Vault, it is a great way to manage your secrets – securing, storing and tightly controlling access. It has the added benefits of being able to handle leasing, key revocation, key rolling and auditing.

During this blog post we’ll accomplish the following …

This blog post will look at seven bugs in MySQL 8.0.

Friday afternoon is always ideal for a quick look at the early quality of MySQL 8.0! Last Friday, I did just that.

If you haven’t heard the news yet, MySQL 8.0 DMR is available for download on mysql.com!

Tools to the ready: pquery2, updated 8.0 compatible scripts in Percona-qa and some advanced regex to wade through the many cores generated by the test run. For those of you who know and use pquery-run.sh, this should mean a lot!

[09:41:50] [21492] ====== TRIAL #39308 …

Welcome to the final – but most important – episode in the MySQL QA Series.

In it, I present my vision for all MySQL Quality Assurance – for all distributions – worldwide.

Episode 13: A Better Approach to all MySQL Regression, Stress & Feature Testing: Random Coverage Testing & SQL Interleaving

1. pquery Review
2. Random Coverage Testing
3. SQL Interleaving
4. The past & the future

Presented by Roel Van de Paar. Full-screen viewing @ 720p resolution recommended

Interested in the full MySQL QA Series?

The post MySQL Quality Assurance: A Vision for the Future by Roel Van de Paar (Final Episode 13) appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog. …

My server is crashing… Now what?

This special episode in the MySQL QA Series is for customers or users experiencing a crash.

1. A crash?
   1. Cheat sheet: https://goo.gl/rrmB9i
   2. Sever install & crash. Note this is as a demonstration: do not action this on a production server!
      sudo yum install -y http://www.percona.com/downloads/percona-release/redhat/0.1-3/percona-release-0.1-3.noarch.rpm
      sudo yum install -y Percona-Server-client-56 Percona-Server-server-56
      sudo service mysql start
2. Gimme Stacks!
   1. Debug info packages (can be executed on a production system, but do match your 5.5, 5.6 or 5.7 version correctly)
      sudo yum install -y Percona-Server-56-debuginfo
   …

Today’s episode is all about Valgrind – from the pro’s to the con’s, from the why to the how! This episode will be of interest to anyone who is or wants to work with Valgrind on a regular or semi-regular basis.

1. Pro’s/Why
2. Con’s
3. How
   1. Using the latest version
      sudo [yum/apt-get] install valgrind
      #OR#
      sudo [yum/apt-get] remove valgrind
      sudo [yum/apt-get] install bzip2 glibc*
      wget http://valgrind.org/downloads/valgrind-3.10.1.tar.bz2
      tar -xf valgrind-3.10.1.tar.bz2; cd valgrind-3.10.1
      ./configure; make; sudo make install
      valgrind –version # This should now read 3.10.1
   2. VGDB (cd ./mysql-test)
      ./lib/v1/mysql-test-run.pl –start-and-exit –valgrind –valgrind-option=”–leak-check=yes”
      –valgrind-option=”–vgdb=yes” …