XtraBackup is a great piece of software from Percona, which allows creating (nearly) lock-less MySQL/InnoDB backups. The tool has been around for quite some time and recently even received a major version bump. I have relied on it many times over the years. As it turns out, using it in some configurations may lead to heavy swapping or prevent MySQL from running queries.

So far I only kept complaining about the wrapper script XtraBackup has been distributed with and which was taken from Oracle’s InnoDB Hot Backup. The infamous innobackupex-1.5.1 was neither well written, nor was it even fully compatible with the XtraBackup’s feature set. This sometimes led to weird problems where there should not be any.

This time the problem can appear elsewhere. Mostly when one using the tool does not understand how it works in certain circumstances.

How does XtraBackup work?

In a few short words. XtraBackup …

Previously we announced that MySQL Cluster 7.2.5 achieved 1.05BN reads per minute on an 8-node configuration using Intel Xeon X5670 CPUs. We got the chance to try out MySQL Cluster 7.2 now also on a bigger cluster using the new Intel Xeon generation, Intel Xeon E5-2670. Using these machines we achieved a new record of 4.3BN reads per minute (72M reads per second) with 30 data nodes.

Running benchmarks is always interesting since one never really knows where the bottleneck appears. In this benchmark the actual bottleneck was that the benchmark programs didn't have the ability to drive through more transactions per second. So we have good expectations we can improve those numbers even further in coming MySQL Cluster releases.

These numbers really attest that the new MySQL Cluster 7.2 generation is a real powerhouse when it comes to performance.

The binary version for MySQL Cluster 7.2.6 has now been made available at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/ (GPL version) or https://support.oracle.com/ (commercial version).

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.2.6 (compared to 7.2.5) are available from the 7.2.6 Change log.

In my raw IO benchmark of Intel 520 SSD we saw that the drive does not provide uniform throughput and response time, but it is interesting how does it affect workload if it comes from MySQL.
I prepared benchmarks results for Sysbench OLTP workload with MySQL running on Intel 520.
You can download it there.

There I want to publish graphs to compare Intel 520 vs regular RAID10.

Throughput:

Response time:

So despite big variation in raw IO, it seems it …

I’ve been seeing a lot of interest in pt-online-schema-change (nonblocking MySQL schema changes), with a lively discussion on the mailing list (which I think I’m not keeping up with…) and a couple of bug reports filed. I’m really interested whether people have tested it rigorously to ensure that it maintains your data integrity. I have done so, and there is a set of tests for it in the codebase, but nothing replaces real-world testing.

Galera Cluster release 2.1 has been published.

This is a maintenance release and includes the new Galera Replication library version 2.1 and corresponding MySQL server releases for both MySQL 5.5.23 and MySQL 5.1.62 versions. The replication API version is still at version #23.

The 2.1 release has a number of fixes in Galera replication and MySQL provider layers, including:

• fixes for foreign key support (with 5.5.23 release only)
• fixes for incremental state transfer
• support for wsrep_sst_method=skip to avoid performing any state snapshot transfer during node joining
• wsrep_urls configuration variable to specify a list of known cluster nodes where node should try to connect during startup
• supporting MySQL replication filters

...to name but a few, a comprehensive list of bug fixes can be browsed in launchpad bug …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.4.5 has been released!  This is an update to our 6.4 driver and brings several bug fixes.  It is appropriate for production use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.5

It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

You can read about the changes in this version at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/connector-net-news-6-4-5.html

You can find our team blog at …

I have been looking for efficient ways to purge data from "Fast Disks" for applications that are time based and do not look at data after a time window has passed. For instance keeping a table where one stores log data from access logs and the data is okay to roll up the data and throw away the details every month. Another example is keeping a log of invites got a Facebook user from a Facebook user. Since the Facebook News feed is time based, stream publish postIds from 4 months ago do not necessarily need to be hot-the user rarely looks 4 months in the pass. Additionally with Timeline, it is hard to see a single story from 10 months ago if it is not as important as other stories. Keeping the data is necessary to delete Facebook posts from your application. So, get rid of each Invite off fast disk, and archive it on slow disks just in case you need to see the data again.

One solution is to code some logic into the application to …

WordPress on S3: no more backups

How much trouble will it be if your webserver failed?  No trouble at all, if your website keeps its content on reliable Amazon S3 storage.

There are a lot of nuances in ensuring proper backups and restores of websites. When was the last backup taken? How much data might have been lost? How long will it take to recover it? When was the last time you tested restore? Do you even have an offsite backup?

Now that you can run dynamic websites off Amazon S3 storage, we’ll demonstrate why you no longer need to worry about backing up and restoring your website data. Losing the webserver is no longer a disaster. Cloud storage offers almost unsurpassable reliability a lot of website owners (small & large) would benefit from. In a way you get an "instantaneous backup" to the cloud. Your …

Hello,

We are delighted to announce the release of SQLyog 10.0. The version number makes this release very special. We must say the journey from SQLyog 1.0 to 10.0 was very exciting and rewarding. SQLyog was first released in 2002 as a MySQL GUI. Now we are a decade away from the first release. During the course of time, we have introduced tons of features taking SQLyog beyond the definition of a GUI. We couldn’t have done it without your encouragement and patronage. A big thank you for being with us in this endeavour.

Listed below are the features and enhancements introduced in this release:

• Refreshing modern looks. We redesigned the user interface with a soothing color palette. We …