The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012 is over. Together with the SkySQL solutions day, it has kept me occupied for 4 full days, from early morning to late at night.

I have to say that I am pleased. The quality of the organization was very high, with a very good lineup of speakers and an excellent technical support.

As usual, I have learned a lot during this week, either directly, by attending talks, or indirectly, by meeting people who told me what was juicy at the talks that I had missed. And I have met new interesting people, and caught up with the people that I know already.

This conference was particularly intense also because I got myself involved in 5 talks, which was probably more than I should have. How did I end up with such a task? It's a long story. …

Today I tried to make incremental backups of a MariaDB instance in a MySQL sandbox with Percona XtraBackup.
I used the recently released XtraBackup 2.0. And of course there is documentation about making incremental backups. 

MySQL sandbox makes it easy to run many different MySQL versions on one machine. It does this by changing the port number, data directory, UNIX socket location and a whole lot more.

So I first started with a full backup and after that I used that backup as a base for the incremental backups. To do that I had to specify the port number which is 5522 and the username and password for the msandbox account. As MySQL uses a UNIX socket instead …

On March 21st I will be in Paris, to attend the OTN MySQL Developers Day. Oracle is organizing these events all over the world, and although the majority are in the US, some of them are touching the good old European continent. Previous events were an all-Oracle show. Recently, the MySQL Community team has been asking for cooperation from the community, and in such capacity I am also presenting at the event, on the topic of testing early releases of MySQL in a sandbox. Of course, this is one of my favorite topics, but it is quite appropriate in this period, when Oracle has released a whole lot of preview features in its MySQL Labs. Which is another favorite topic of mine, since I was the one who insisted for having the Labs when I was working in the …

Tungsten Replicator 2.0.5 was released this week-end. The release notes have quite a long list of bug fixes. Thanks to all the ones who have submitted bug reports, and fixes! There are a couple of new features as well. The replicator includes now a slave prefetch service. Unlike parallel replication, this feature works fine with a single database, and provides performance improvements that in many cases solve the slave lagging problems. This was a bitch of a feature to get right. Many have tried it, many have experienced various degrees of success, and several failures. We started with the bold assertiveness of the brave after an exciting talk at Percona Live in October, and I was …

MySQL::Sandbox 3.0.24 was released yesterday, with many new features. More than vanilla MySQLIf you have missed my previous announcement, here's the gist of it. MySQL Sandbox can now deal with tarballs from either Percona Server or MariaDB. The main difference after this change is that you can now create a directory called <PREFIX>5.5.16 and make_sandbox will recognize it as well as the plain 5.5.16.

$ make_sandbox --export_binaries --add_prefix=ps \
   Percona-Server-5.5.11-rel20.2-114.Darwin.i386.tar.gz  \
   -- --sandbox_directory=msb_ps5_5_11
unpacking Percona-Server-5.5.11-rel20.2-114.Darwin.i386.tar.gz
[…]
installing with the following …

In a few weeks, I will be on the road, for an intense set of presentations in the USA.

San Francisco, April 7thI will start the tour at the San Francisco MySQL User Group. On April 7, at 6pm I will talk about Advanced MySQL replication for the masses. This talk will explore topics such as bi-directional replication, multiple sources, parallel replication, seamless failover, with the help of Tungsten replicator.




Santa Clara, April 11, 12The MySQL conference starts on Monday, April 11th, with several three-hour tutorials.

• April 11, 9:00amMySQL Replication Advanced Techniques. This will cover MySQL replication beyond the basics. Everything you can do with replication, …

The feature is documented in WL#344. (There was a manual online as well together with the binaries for MySQL 5.6.0, but they were removed after a few days for a good reason. I am confident that both the manual and some binaries will eventually show up soon).
Since as of today there are no binaries for MySQL 5.6.x, you need to get the code and …

A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me if I knew of a way of filtering a bunch of binary logs, to extract only statements related to a single table. The task was about filtering a few hundred binary log files.

It's a tricky problem. Even with my experience with regular expressions, I knew that using a script to extract statements related to a single table was going to be a nasty business.
However, I know of an entity that can filter by table name efficiently, and that's the MySQL replication system. So I suggested using replication to a sandbox with a replicate-wild-do-table statement to get the job done.
My friend was skeptical and did not want to go that way. I was busy writing an article for an Italian magazine and did not follow up immediately. But today, with the article safely in the editor's hands, I did a quick test, and guess what? It works!

Here is a step-by-step procedure to do it. I started …