IST Basics

State transfers in Galera remain a mystery to most people.  Incremental State transfers (as opposed to full State Snapshot transfers) are used under the following conditions:

• The Joiner node reports Galera a valid Galera GTID to the cluster
• The Donor node selected contains all the transactions the Joiner needs to catch up to the rest of the cluster in its Gcache
• The Donor node can establish a TCP connection to the Joiner on port 4568 (by default)

IST states

Galera has many internal node states related to Joiner nodes.  They currently are:

1. Joining
2. Joining: preparing for State Transfer
3. Joining: requested State Transfer
4. Joining: receiving State Transfer
5. Joining: State …

Lately I saw many cases when users specified option

--base64-output=DECODE-ROWS

  to print out a statement representation of row events in MySQL binary logs just to get nothing. Reason for this is obvious: option

--base64-output=DECODE-ROWS

  does not convert row events into its string representation, this is job of option

--verbose

. But why users mix these two options so often? This blog post is result of my investigations.

There are already two great blog posts about printing row events on the Percona blog: “Debugging problems with row based replication” by Justin Swanhart and “ …

MySQL 5.7 comes with a new set of features and multi-source replication is one of them. In few words this means that one slave can replicate from different masters simultaneously.

During the last couple of months I’ve been playing a lot with this trying to analyze its potential in a real case that I’ve been facing while working with a customer.

This was motivated because my customer is already using multi-sourced slaves with Tungsten Replicator and I wanted to do a side-by-side comparison between Tungsten Replicator and Multi-source Replication in MySQL 5.7

Consider the following scenario:

DB1 is our main master attending mostly writes from several applications, it also needs to serve read …

Previously I tested Tokutek’s Fractal Trees (TokuMX & TokuMXse) as MongoDB storage engines – today let’s look into the MySQL area.

I am going to use modified LinkBench in a heavy IO-load.

I compared InnoDB without compression, InnoDB with 8k compression, TokuDB with quicklz compression.
Uncompressed datasize is 115GiB, and cachesize is 12GiB for InnoDB and 8GiB + 4GiB OS cache for TokuDB.

Important to note is that I used tokudb_fanout=128, which is only available in our latest Percona Server release.
I …

Thank you for attending my July 15 webinar, “Creating Best in Class Backup solutions for your MySQL environment.” Due to the amount of content we discussed and some minor technical difficulties faced near the end of webinar we have decided to cover the final two slides of the presentation along with the questions asked by attendees during the webinar via this blog post.

The slides are available for download. And you can watch the webinar in it’s entirety here.

The final two slides were about our tips for having a …

I recently worked with a customer who had a weird issue: when their MySQL server was started (Percona Server 5.5), if they try to run service mysql start a second time, the init script was not able to detect that an instance was already running. As a result, it tried to start a second instance with the same settings as the first one. Of course this fails and this creates a mess. What was the issue? A missing rule in SELinux. At least it looks like

Summary

If SELinux is set to enforcing and if you are using Percona Server on CentOS/RHEL 6 (other versions could be affected), service mysql start doesn’t work properly and a fix is simple to run:

# grep mysqld_safe /var/log/audit/audit.log | audit2allow -M mysqld_safe
# semodule -i mysqld_safe.pp
# service mysql restart

Other options are:

• Set SELinux to permissive
• Use the CentOS/RHEL standard MySQL init script …

Valgrind's helgrind tool identifies data races and lock deadlocks in multi-threaded programs.  Since the MySQL server is a multi-threaded program, can helgrind find any issues in the MySQL server?

A simple test that does nothing except start up the MySQL server and shut it down is run on the MySQL test suite with memcheck and with helgrind.  For this simple test on MySQL 5.7.7, the memcheck run is nice and clean but the …

In my previous post, I used incremental backups in Percona XtraBackup as a method for rebuilding a Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) node without triggering an actual SST. Practically this reproduces the SST steps, but it can be handy if you already had backups available to use.

In this post, I want to present another methodology for this that also uses a full backup, but instead of incrementals uses any binary logs that the cluster may be producing.

Binary logs on PXC

Binary logs are not strictly needed in PXC for replication, but …

Beware the SST

In Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) I often run across users who are fearful of SSTs on their clusters. I’ve always maintained that if you can’t cope with a SST, PXC may not be right for you, but that doesn’t change the fact that SSTs with multiple Terabytes of data can be quite costly.

SST, by current definition, is a full backup of a Donor to Joiner.  The most popular method is Percona XtraBackup, so we’re talking about a donor node that must:

1. Run a full XtraBackup that reads its entire datadir
2. Keep up with Galera replication to it as much as possible (though laggy donors don’t send flow control)
3. Possibly still be serving application traffic if you don’t remove Donors from rotation.
…

I recently helped a customer figure out why a minor version MySQL upgrade was indicating that some tables needed to be rebuilt. The mysql_upgrade program should be run for every upgrade, no matter how big or small the version difference is, but when only the minor version changes, I would normally not expect it to require tables to be rebuilt.

Turns out some of their tables were still marked with an older MySQL version, which could mean a few things… most likely that something went wrong with a previous upgrade, or that the tables were copied from a server with an older version.

In cases like this, did you know there is a fast, safe and simple way to check the version associated with a table? You can do this by reading the FRM file, following the format specification found here.

If you look at that page, you’ll see that the …