Failure is an unavoidable part of IT life, but it does not always have to imply MySQL service downtime. In the years I have been working at Percona, I have been involved in many customer emergency cases, and I have seen a good number of problems that could have been avoided or alleviated if relatively simple proactive measures were taken.

On July 17th 2013, at 10 a.m. PDT, I will be delivering a webinar focused on presenting the Top 5 such measures, with the objective of helping you assess your current situation, and implement any needed changes to avoid production downtime in the future. The webinar is titled: “5 Proactive Measures to Minimize MySQL Downtime.”

Later that day, I will be delivering the …

The MySQL Developer Tools team is pleased to announce the availability of the second beta release of MySQL Workbench 6.0. MySQL Workbench 6.0 is the new major update of the Development and Administration tool for MySQL. This release includes over 150 bug fixes (~40 since 6.0.2), 30 new features and a new redesigned UI. As a beta, this release is not suitable for production use.  Please test and file your bug reports at http://bugs.mysql.com

As always, MySQL Workbench is natively available on Windows, Mac, Linux.

Improvements in MySQL Workbench 6.0:

• a new redesigned Home screen
• the SQL Editor and Server Administration UIs were merged into a single connection specific interface, allowing for quick access to administration features while simplifying the location of specific features
• improved model Synchronization, lets you …

In my last post, I showed what a Fractal Tree® index is at a high level. Once again, the Fractal Tree index is the data structure inside TokuMX and TokuDB, our MongoDB and MySQL products. One of its strengths is the ability to get high levels of compression on the stored data. In this post, I’ll explain why that is.

At a high level, one can argue that there isn’t anything special about our compression algorithms. We basically do this: we take large chunks of data, use known compression methods (e.g. zlib, lzma, …

Join 8000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. SQL is derided by many and for good reason. It’s key to scalability yet terribly difficult to write good code. Here’s a few quick tips to write tighter queries in MySQL 1. Get rid of those Subqueries! Subqueries are a standard part of SQL, unfortunately […]

The post 3 Simple Patterns for Tighter MySQL Code appeared first on Scalable Startups.

For the same customer I am exploring ZFS for backups, the twin server is using regular LVM and XFS. On this twin, I have setup mylvmbackup for a more conservative backup approach. I quickly found some odd behaviors, the backup was taking much longer than what I was expecting. It is not the first time I saw that, but here it was obvious. So I recorded some metrics, bi from vmstat and percent of cow space used from lvs during a backup. Cow space is the Copy On Write buffer used by LVM to record the modified pages like they were at the beginning of the snapshot. Upon reads, LVM must scan the list to verify that there’s no newer version. Here’s the other details about the backup:

• Filesystem: 2TB, xfs
• Snapsize: 60GB
• Amount to backup: ~600GB
• Backup tool: mylvmbackup
• Compressor: pbzip2

…

The Early Bird pricing for MySQL Connect will end on July 19, 2013; you only have a few days left to register and save US$500.

MySQL Connect will take place in San Francisco September 21-23. The program includes exciting keynotes, 66 conference sessions, 6 Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, 8 Hands-On Labs, demo pods, fun receptions and more. Some of the presentations you will be able to attend are:

• The State of …

I’ve previously written about several problems which can benefit from additional visibility provided by PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA in MySQL 5.6, and it’s time to add to that list.  A very common problem involves connections which are not properly closed – they simply idle until they reach wait_timeout (or interactive_timeout, depending on the client flags set), and the server terminates the connection.  Who knows what the root cause is – perhaps the client terminated without cleaning up connections, or maybe there was just no load, or maybe the network cable was unplugged.  It’s something application developers – particularly those using persistent connections managed by a pool – …

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the average is the index of central tendency. But what if the tendency isn’t central?

I’ve worked many performance issues where the latency or response time was multimodal, and higher-latency modes turned out to be the cause of the problem. Their existence isn’t shown by the average – the arithmetic mean; it could only be seen by examining the distribution as a histogram, density plot, heat map, or frequency trail. Once you know that more than one mode is present, it’s often straightforward to determine what causes the slower mode, by seeing what parameters of …

This week we finish up talking about the Openark Kit for MySQL. Ear Candy is using both --master-data and --tab with mysqldump, and At the Movies features Robert Hodges of Continuent presenting Scalable MySQL Operation in the Cloud with Continuent Tungsten.

Openark Kit series:
Part 1
Part 2

Openark Kit
oak-purge-master-logs
PURGE BINARY LOGS at the MySQL manual page.

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It was a long time that I wanted to dig more the solution proposed by Percona to improve "TRX list" (transactions list) code -- the initial story by Alexey is starting here, then my following analyze is here, and then another test results from Percona are here. The initial discussion was more related to the READ-ONLY TRANSACTIONS introduced within MySQL 5.6 (and it was introduced exactly to get a rid of TRX mutex on read-only requests where transactions are not required at all). But in the last tests Alexey involved a very good question: what …