Your MySQL server is overloaded. You see hundreds of running queries in the SHOW PROCESSLIST taking many seconds to run, or can’t connect at all because all connections slots are busy. If you have worked with MySQL long enough you surely have seen it, probably more than once. This is what I would call “MySQL server overload” – having more work than the server can possibly handle. At this point I see people often jumping to the conclusion that something went wrong with MySQL and focus all their effort on this belief. This is also often how we see questions framed when they are filed with our Support or to Emergency Consulting.

In fact there are two very distinct causes for such a situation – and to find the resolution most effectively you need to understand what …

8PM. One of the servers found a critical bug. Hop online and discuss, log bug. 10PM. Patch ready. 10:30PM. New build ready. 10:45PM. New RQG run initiated. This was by no means an uncommon sight during the months of testing that went into Percona Server 5.6, in fact it was commonplace.

At a certain point, we had 3 very high end servers (modern cpu’s, heaps of cores and memory), all equipped with either fast SSD’s or Fusion-io flash storage, executing thousands of trials, 8 in parallel per server, each executing 1 to 25 mysql threads per running mysqld instance.

And that was just the final months of testing. Before that much work was done on finding “every last bug out there”. We discovered many bugs in both upstream (Oracle’s MySQL 5.6) and in Percona Server 5.6. I personally logged around 100 bugs, but the total count would be much higher still.

My colleague …

How do we ensure that, when we have 35+ testable option combinations for mysqld, we test each and every combination of them? For example: will a different innodb_log_file_size combined with more innodb_log_files_in_group and a modified innodb_fast_shutdown setting truly not affect Percona’s log archiving feature?

Most option-related bugs are caused by the setting of 1 or 2 mysqld options to a non-standard value. Maybe in an odd situation 3 mysqld options need to be set in combination. So, starting with 2 option combinations (1 option set is easy to calculate: it matches the number of options to be tested), let’s see how many combinations we would have to run: 35^2 = 1225 combinations. aa, ab, ac, …. ba, bb, bc… etc.

In real life mysqld testing, this is not entirely true as one would never specify “aa” in relation to …

This post builds on the How to obtain the “LES” (Last Executed Statement) from an Optimized Core Dump? post written about a year ago.

A day after that post was released, Shane Bester wrote an improved version, How to obtain all executing queries from a core file on his blog. Reading that post is key to understanding what follows.

I am faced with some complex bugs which would do well with SQL testcases. Extracting the last executed statement (and maybe all queries running at the time of the crash/asserts) is crucial to generate testcases well. E.g. you may have a full SQL trace from RQG or …

NOTE: This is part 1 of what will be a two-part series on the performance implications of using in-flight data encryption.

Some of you may recall my security webinar from back in mid-August; one of the follow-up questions that I was asked was about the performance impact of enabling SSL connections. My answer was 25%, based on some 2011 data that I had seen over on yaSSL’s website, but I included the caveat that it is workload-dependent, because the most expensive part of using SSL is establishing the connection. Not long thereafter, I received a request to conduct some more specific benchmarks surrounding SSL usage in MySQL, and today I’m going to show the results.

First, the testing …

Baron recently wrote about sending the query to the data looking at distributed systems like Cassandra. I want to take a look at more simple systems like MySQL and see how we’re doing in this space.

It is obvious getting computations as closer to the data as possible is the most efficient as we will likely have less data to work with on the higher level in this case. Internally MySQL starts add optimizations which help in this regard, such as Index Condition Pushdown which allow storage engine to do most rudimentary data filtering improving efficiency.

The more important case though is the Application – Database interaction. Modern applications often have quite complicated logic which might not map to SQL very well. Framework and the practices developers follow can only add to this problem. As results Application may be issuing a …

MySQL DBAs know that integrating MySQL and a big data solution can be challenging. That’s why I invite you to join me this Wednesday (Oct. 2) at 10 a.m. Pacific time for a free webinar in which I’ll walk you through how to implement a successful big data strategy with Apache Hadoop and MySQL. This webinar is specifically tailored for MySQL DBAs and developers (or any person with a previous MySQL experience) who wants to know about how to use Apache Hadoop together with MySQL for Big Data.

The webinar is titled, “Implementing MySQL and Hadoop for Big Data,” and you can register here.

Storing Big Data in MySQL alone can be challenging:

• Single MySQL instance may not …

With the close of call for papers earlier this month, the Percona Live London conference committee was in full swing this past week reviewing all of the many submissions for November’s Percona Live London MySQL Conference.

The submissions are far ranging and cover some really interesting topics, making the lineup for Percona Live London really strong! What the committee looks for in a submission is how much “value” a talk will bring to the conference – this is to say it needs to be far more that a product demo. As such, real-world experiences are receiving much more favorable reviews, along with talks that cover methodologies the attendees will …

The other day I was running pt-duplicate-key-checker on behalf of a customer and noticed some peculiar recommendations on an InnoDB table with an odd structure (no PRIMARY key, but multiple UNIQUE constraints). This got me thinking about how InnoDB promotes UNIQUE constraints to the role of PRIMARY KEYs. The documentation is pretty clear:

[DOCS]
When you define a PRIMARY KEY on your table, InnoDB uses it as the clustered index. Define a primary key for each table that you create. If there is no logical unique and non-null column or set of columns, add a new auto-increment column, whose values are filled in automatically.

If you do not define a PRIMARY KEY for your table, MySQL locates the first UNIQUE index where all the key …

Thanks to everyone who attended last week’s webinar on MySQL security; hopefully you’ve all gone out and set SELinux to enforcing mode if you weren’t already running that way. If you weren’t able to attend, the recording and slides are available for viewing/download. But now, without further ado, here are the questions which we didn’t have time to cover during the presentation.

Q: Do you have a favorite software firewall you recommend that I can run on an EC2 instance in front of my MySQL server?
A: I’d probably just do this with iptables. Any of the other Linux-based software firewall packages are all going to be wrappers around iptables anyway. However, if …