Next week the US celebrates Thanksgiving Day. For those that are American or live here, this is a significant event. Three different experiences recently have lead me to write this request for ALL MySQL community members to give thanks to those that have contributed to the MySQL ecosystem. I have made a commitment to myself, and I would like to challenge others to write one book review per week in December, that’s 4 book reviews to the MySQL books that I have on my bookshelf that have made an impact in some way. I ask others to give it a go too.

It only takes a few minutes to pen a comment on Amazon, or a publishers site, but to authors it means so much more. I can only speak for myself, but any comment; good, bad or ugly; helps to know you are out there and you took the time to acknowledge somebody’s work of art (in this case a publication).

I only have to look at my bookshelf and I find the following MySQL books (in …

Translating theory to practice is never easy. Morgan gives us the right steps in a play environment to move from dev.mysql.com native MySQL rpm’s to the new MySQL yum repository. I thought I would try it out.

1. Confirming existing packages

A necessary step, however immediately I have more dependencies including Perl DBD (used in several utilities) including MHA.

$ sudo su -
$ rpm -qa | grep -i mysql
MySQL-devel-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-test-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-shared-compat-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-server-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
perl-DBD-MySQL-4.013-3.el6.x86_64
MySQL-client-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-embedded-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
MySQL-shared-5.6.13-1.el6.x86_64
mha4mysql-node-0.54-1.el5.noarch

A further trap in the more complex real-world environments, in my case the installation of Percona …

Using the MySQL 5.6 Performance Schema it is very easy to see what is actually running on your MySQL instance. No more sampling or installing software or worrying about disk I/O performance with techniques like SHOW PROCESSLIST, enabling the general query log or sniffing the TCP/IP stack.

The following SQL is used to give me a quick 60 second view on a running MySQL system of ALL statements executed.

use performance_schema;
update setup_consumers set enabled='YES' where name IN ('events_statements_history','events_statements_current','statements_digest');
truncate table events_statements_current; truncate table events_statements_history; truncate table events_statements_summary_by_digest;
do sleep(60);
select now(),(count_star/(select sum(count_star) FROM events_statements_summary_by_digest) * 100) as pct, count_star, left(digest_text,150) as stmt, digest from events_statements_summary_by_digest order by 2 desc;
update setup_consumers set …

Recently a client asked me how long it would take for an ALTER TABLE to complete. Generally the answer is “it depends”. While this was running on a production system I tried with the Performance Schema in MySQL 5.6 to work out some answer to this question. While I never got to investigate various tests using INPLACE and COPY for comparison, Morgan Tocker made the request for experiences with online ALTER in A closer look at Online DDL in MySQL 5.6. Hopefully somebody with more time can expand on my preliminary observations.

Using Mark Leith’s ps_helper (older version) I monitored the File I/O to see if I could determine when using innodb_file_per_table the percentage of table writing to be completed.

Other data access on this slave server was disabled, …

I was really pleased to see the announcement by Oracle MySQL yum repositories that they have now produced a yum repository from where the MySQL RPMs they provide can be downloaded. This makes keeping up to date much easier. Many companies setup internal yum repositories with the software they need as then updating servers is much easier and can be done with a simple command. For many people at home that means you set this up once and don’t need to check for updates and do manual downloads, but can do a quick yum update xxxx and you get the latest version. Great!  This new yum repository only covers RHEL6 did not include RHEL5 which is not yet end of life and still used by me and probably quite a lot of other people. I filed bug#70773 to ask for RHEL5 support to be …

Working with MySQL 5.6 under CentOS 6.4 I came across the following problem with MySQL reporting it did not shutdown successfully.

$ sudo su -
$ service mysql stop
Shutting down MySQL................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... …

The announcement of the MySQL Yum repositories was a long overdue request on my wish list. While it was possible to find MySQL at http://public-yum.oracle.com/ it was not the GA version MySQL 5.6. (As I write this post, I check and find that indeed it now appears this may be possible http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/MySQL56/).

I have previously installed MySQL 5.6.13 via rpms downloaded from MySQL Downloads, so I expected the upgrade to be straightforward. Following Chapter 3. Upgrading MySQL with the MySQL Yum Repository I …

A trap for those new to the MySQL Performance Schema is the expectation that thread_id in tables such as events_statements_current matches the id you find in the MySQL processlist. This is NOT TRUE.

If we look at the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PROCESSLIST table we will find information like:

mysql> select id,db,command,state from information_schema.processlist order by id;
-----------+--------------------+---------+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| id        | db                 | command | state                                                            |
+-----------+--------------------+---------+------------------------------------------------------------------+
|         1 | NULL               | Connect | Slave has read all relay log; waiting for the slave I/O thread t |
|         2 | NULL               | …

Using MySQL 5.6.13 under CentOS 6.4, I had a replication failure on one master/slave topology because the master binary log had the following entry that was intentionally written by the MySQL server.

$ mysqlbinlog --start-position=244670849 mysql-bin.000029
...
# at 244670849
#131028 19:31:38 server id 39  end_log_pos 244670906 CRC32 0xc5d084ec
# Incident: LOST_EVENTS
RELOAD DATABASE; # Shall generate syntax error
# at 244670906
...

The question is why? I do not know the answer. Searching online indicates this can occur in a MySQL Cluster environment, and can occur around the use of GRANT statements. Neither of these situations are applicable here. This site runs 4 different master/slave topologies all running the same version, and this has been the only occurrence.

The message, if taken literally could indicate that the master server failed to write all events to the master binary log, but instead of reporting any …

I was playing around with MySQL Workbench earlier in the week, and ran across the “clean up SQL” feature, which I thought was neat. Here’s a picture-based demonstration – you can click on the pictures to make them bigger, so … Continue reading