The latest from the MySQL community

One type of question we get very often (even in the form of filed bugs!) is how to switch from stock MySQL to Percona Server or switch from Percona Server 5.5 to Percona XtraDB Cluster using yum, but à la apt-get, i.e. having yum handle the replace.

In its simplest form, yum cannot replace a package¹ for another like apt-get does:

# yum -q -q install Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-server
Error: Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-server conflicts with Percona-Server-server-55
Error: Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-client conflicts with Percona-Server-client-55
Error: Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-shared conflicts with Percona-Server-shared-55


One solution for this is to manually uninstall …

Good news everyone! I recently presented a webinar: Percona Server 5.6: Enterprise Grade MySQL. It was also recorded so you can watch along or view the slide deck. As with all my talks, I am not simply reading the slides so it really is worth to listen to the audio rather than just glance through the slide deck.

There were a number of great questions asked which I’ll answer below:

Q: How does Stewart feel about this version of 5.6 taking into consideration “Stewart’s .20 rule?” (ref 2013 Percona Live Conference).

A: For those who aren’t familiar with it, I have a rule which I call “Stewart’s dot twenty rule” which I’ve posted a few times about on my personal blog. It …

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 …

Thanks to all who attended my PXC Operations webinar last week.  If you missed it you can watch the video here.

I wanted to take some time to answer the questions I didn’t get to during the broadcast.

Is there an easy way to leverage the xtrabackup SST and IST in an xtradb cluster to take your full and incremental backups of the cluster’s databases?

An SST is a full backup of one of the nodes in your database already.  If you want another backup, you may as well just run xtrabackup yourself (though don’t forget the discussion about locking from the talk).

IST is not affected by wsrep_sst_method …

With the last Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) release, two major features were added:

* a new command to bootstrap the cluster was added to the init script
* SST via Xtrabackup now supports Xtrabackup 2.1 features

In this post, I want to explain the benefits of these added features and how to use them.

If you follow the mysqlperformanceblog regularly, you’ve already noticed that there are several ways to start a node and that it’s not always easy to start the node that is supposed to bootstrap the entire cluster.

See :
- …

Async and PXC

A common question I get about Percona XtraDB Cluster is if you can mix it with asynchronous replication, and the answer is yes!  You can pick any node in your cluster and it can either be either a slave or a master just like any other regular MySQL standalone server (Just be sure to use log-slave-updates in both cases on the node in question!).  Consider this architecture:

However, there are some caveats to be aware of.  If you slave from a cluster node, there is no built in mechanism to fail that slave over automatically to another master node in your cluster.  You cannot assume that the binary log positions are the same on all nodes in your cluster (even if they start binary logging at the same time), so you can’t issue a CHANGE MASTER without knowing the proper binary log position to start at.

…

The aim of this post is to enumerate real-world usage of Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), and also to solicit use cases from the readers. One of the prominent usages in the production environment that we have come across (and our Percona consultants have assisted) is that of HP Cloud. There is a post about it here by Patrick Galbraith of HP. The post focuses on their deployment of PXC for HP Cloud DNS. The post focuses on the key aspects of synchronous replication setup with high-availability guarantees like split-brain immunity.

Nobody likes to debug async replication while its broken or …

I talk with lot of people who are really interested in Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and mostly they are interested in PXC as a high-availability solution.  But, what they tend not to think too much about is if moving from async to synchronous replication is right for their application or not.

Facts about Galera replication

There’s a lot of different facts about Galera that come into play here, and it isn’t always obvious how they will affect your database workload.  For example:

• Transaction commit takes approximately the worst packet round trip time (RTT) between any two nodes in your cluster.
• Transaction apply on slave nodes is still asynchronous from client commit (except on the original node where the transaction is committed)
• Galera prevents writing conflicts to these pending transactions …

Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these basics.

log_slave_updates is REQUIRED

You need to have log_slave_updates enabled on the cluster node acting as async slave for replicated events from the async master to be applied to the other nodes, that is if you have more than one PXC node. This is because before Galera can create writesets for the replicated events, binlog events must be generated for the transactions first. Under …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.30-23.7.4 for MySQL on April 17, 2013. Binaries are available from the downloads area or from our software repositories.

New Features:

• Percona XtraDB Cluster has implemented initial implementation of weighted quorum. Weight for node can be assigned via pc.weight option in the wsrep_provider_options variable. Accepted values are in the range [0, 255] (inclusive). Quorum is computed using weighted sum over group members.
• …