The Question Recently, a customer asked us:

After importing a new section of user data into our Tungsten cluster, we are seeing perpetually rising replication lag. We are sitting at 8.5hrs estimated convergence time after importing around 50 million rows and this lag is climbing continuously. We are currently migrating some of our users from a NoSQL database into our Tungsten cluster. We have a procedure to write out a bunch of CSV files after translating our old data into columns and then we recursively send them to the write master using the mysql client. Specifically our import SQL is doing LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE and the reading in a large CSV file to do the import. We have 20k records per CSV file and we have 12 workers which insert them in parallel.

Simple Overview The Skinny

In cases like this, the slaves are having trouble with the database unable to keep up with the apply stage …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.26-31.37 on June 26, 2019. Binaries are available from the downloads section or from our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.26-31.37 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.26-29
• Codership WSREP API release 5.7.25
• Codership Galera library 3.26

All Percona software is open-source and free.

Bugs Fixed

• PXC-2480: In some …

The Question Recently, a customer asked us:

What would cause a node switch to fail in a Tungsten Cluster?

For example, we saw the following during a recent session where a switch failed:

cctrl> switch to db3 

SELECTED SLAVE: db3@alpha 
SET POLICY: MAINTENANCE => MAINTENANCE 
PURGE REMAINING ACTIVE SESSIONS ON CURRENT MASTER 'db1@alpha' 
PURGED A TOTAL OF 0 ACTIVE SESSIONS ON MASTER 'db1@alpha' 
FLUSH TRANSACTIONS ON CURRENT MASTER 'db1@alpha' 
Exception encountered during SWITCH. 
Failed while setting the replicator 'db1' role to 'slave' 
ClusterManagerException: Exception while executing command 'replicatorStatus' on manager 'db1' 
Exception=Failed to execute '/alpha/db1/manager/ClusterManagementHelper/replicatorStatus alpha db3' 
Reason= 
CLUSTER_MEMBER(true) 
STATUS(FAIL) 
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
|alpha | …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.44-28.34 on June 19, 2019. Binaries are available from the downloads section or from our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.44-28.34 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server 5.6.44-86.0
• Codership WSREP API release 5.6.43
• Codership Galera library 3.26

All Percona software is open-source and free.

Bugs Fixed

• PXC-2480: In some …

The Question Recently, a customer asked us:

Why would heavy disk IO cause the Tungsten Manager and not MySQL to be starved of resources?

For example, we saw the following in the Manager log file tmsvc.log:

2019/06/03 00:50:30 | Pinging the JVM took 29 seconds to respond.
2019/06/03 00:50:30 | Pinging the JVM took 25 seconds to respond.
2019/06/03 00:50:30 | Pinging the JVM took 21 seconds to respond.
2019/06/03 00:50:30 | Pinging the JVM took 16 seconds to respond.
2019/06/03 00:50:30 | Pinging the JVM took 12 seconds to respond.
2019/06/03 00:50:30 | Pinging the JVM took 8 seconds to respond.

The Answer Why a Java application might be slow or freezing

The answer is that if a filesystem is busy being written to by another process, the background I/O will cause the Java JVM garbage collection (GC) to pause.

This problem is not specific to Continuent Tungsten …

Background The Skinny

Performing schema changes often requires extended downtime for applications. This is due to MySQL needing to rebuild tables for common schema change operations. Tools like pt-online-schema-change have been written to try to overcome the downtime associated with schema changes, however they are complex and put a high load on the database. Amazon’s Aurora improves some schema changes operations, but still requires a table rebuild for common operations like adding a column using before or after, or simply to add a column with a default value. Rebuilding a table with millions of rows can take hours and prevent writes to that table the entire time.

How Can Tungsten Clustering Keep Applications Running? How Does It All Work?

…

In my previous post, some time ago, I wrote about the new cluster feature of ProxySQL. For that post, we were working with three nodes, now we’ll work with even more! If you’ve installed one ProxySQL per application instance and would like to work up to more, then this post is for you. If this is new to you, though, read my earlier post first for more context.

Check the image below to understand the structure of “one ProxySQL per application”. This means you have ProxySQL installed, and your application (Java, PHP, Apache server etc) in the same VM (virtual machine).

Having taken a look at that you probably have a few questions, such as:

• What happens if you have 20 nodes …

This was not on the radar. I have never been proficient in Galera clusters and related technologies, and thus I hadn’t given much thought to Percona Xtradb Cluster (PXC), until Alkin approached me at FOSDEM, and proposed to extend dbdeployer features to support PXC. He mentioned that many support engineers at Percona use dbdeployer) on a daily basis and that the addition of PXC would be welcome.

I could not follow up …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.43-28.32 on February 28, 2019. Binaries are available from the downloads section or from our software repositories.

This release of Percona XtraDB Cluster includes the support of Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish). Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.43-28.32 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server 5.6.43-84.3
• Codership WSREP API release 5.6.42
• Codership Galera library 3.25

All Percona software is …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.25-31.35 on February 28, 2018. Binaries are available from the downloads section or from our software repositories.

This release of Percona XtraDB Cluster includes the support of Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish). Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.25-31.35 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.25-28
• Galera Replication library 3.25
• Galera/Codership WSREP API Release 5.7.24

All Percona software is open-source and free.

Bugs Fixed

…