In this blog post we’ll discuss pt-online-schema-change, and how to correctly use it.

Always use pt-osc?

Altering large tables can be still a problematic DBA task, even now after we’ve improved Online DDL features in MySQL 5.6 and 5.7. Some ALTER types are still not online, or sometimes just too expensive to execute on busy production master.

So in some cases, we may want to apply an

ALTER

 first on slaves, taking them out of traffic pool one by one and bringing them back after the

ALTER

 is done. In the end, we can promote one of the already altered slaves to be new master, so that the downtime/maintenance time is greatly minimized. The ex-master can be altered later, without affecting production. Of course, this method works best when the schema change is …

Percona is pleased to announce the availability of Percona Toolkit 2.2.17.  Released March 7, 2016. Percona Toolkit is a collection of advanced command-line tools to perform a variety of MySQL server and system tasks that are too difficult or complex for DBAs to perform manually. Percona Toolkit, like all Percona software, is free and open source.

This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.2 series. It includes multiple bug fixes for pt-table-checksum with better support for Percona XtraDB Cluster, various other fixes, as well as MySQL 5.7 general compatibility. Full details are below. Downloads are available  …

Recently we released an updated version of our Percona Toolkit with an important update for pt-online-schema-change if you use MySQL 5.6. A new parameter has been added, analyze-before-swap. What does it do? Let me explain it in more detail.

A bug not a bug

A customer contacted us because pt-online-schema-change caused hundred of queries to get stuck after the ALTER was done. All those queries were trying read from the altered table but for some reason the queries never finished. Of course, it caused downtime. The reason behind this is this “bug not a bug”:

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=78289

As a summary, if you are running 5.6 with persistent stats enabled (which it is by default), the optimizer in some …

Percona is pleased to announce the availability of Percona Toolkit 2.2.16, released on November 9, 2015. Percona Toolkit is a collection of advanced command-line tools to perform a variety of MySQL server and system tasks that are too difficult or complex for DBAs to perform manually. Percona Toolkit, like all Percona software, is free and open source.

This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.2 series. It includes new features and bug fixes as well as continued preparation for MySQL 5.7 compatibility. Full details are below. Downloads are available here and …

There are cases where we need to implement MySQL partitioning, or at least test if it is an option to solve an issue. However, how are we able to test it when the table on our production environment has hundreds of millions of rows, several composite indexes and/or the size on disk is hundreds of gigabytes?

Testing environments usually don’t have all the data that production has and if they have, probably you are not testing all the use-cases at a database level. Therefore, is it possible to test MySQL Partitioning on production impacting as less as possible?

When we execute pt-online-schema-change, it creates a table, triggers, and then copies the data. As we are going to test partitioning we are going to need both tables – with and without partitioning – and we are going to use triggers to keep both tables consistent. A good thing about changing a table to use partitioning is that, usually, …

After some recent work with systemd I’ve realized it’s power and I can come clean that I am a fan. I realize that there are multitudes of posts out there with arguments both for and against systemd but let’s look at some nice ways to have systemd provide us with (but not limited to) pt-kill-as-a-service.

This brief post introduces you to a systemd unit file and how we can leverage them to enable pt-kill at startup, have it start after mysqld and ensure that MySQL is running by using the mysql service as a dependency of pt-kill. By using systemd to handle this we don’t have to complicate matters by ‘monitoring the monitor’ using hacky shell scripts, cron or utilities like monit.

So then, a quick primer on systemd, because lets face it, we’ve all been avoiding it. Systemd is not new but it made recent headlines in …

Percona is pleased to announce the availability of Percona Toolkit 2.2.15.  Released August 28, 2015. Percona Toolkit is a collection of advanced command-line tools to perform a variety of MySQL server and system tasks that are too difficult or complex for DBAs to perform manually. Percona Toolkit, like all Percona software, is free and open source.

This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.2 series. It includes multiple bug fixes as well as continued preparation for MySQL 5.7 compatibility. Full details are below. Downloads are available here and from …

MySQL replication is a process that allows you to easily maintain multiple copies of MySQL data by having them copied automatically from a master to a slave database.

It’s essential to make sure the slave servers have the same set of data as the master to ensure data is consistent within the replication stream. MySQL slave server data can drift from the master for many reasons – e.g. replication errors, accidental direct updates on slave, etc.

Here at Percona Support we highly recommend that our customers periodically run the pt-table-checksum tool to verify data consistency within replication streams. Specifically, after fixing replication errors on slave servers to ensure that the slave has identical data as its master. As you don’t want to put …

Madrid MySQL Users Group is having a Meetup this afternoon, Wednesday, 13th May at 19:00. I will be presenting (in Spanish) a quick summary of Percona Toolkit and also offering a summary of the new features in MySQL 5.7 as the release candidate has been announced and we don’t expect new functionality. This is also … Continue reading MMUG12: Talk about Percona Toolkit and the new features of MySQL 5.7

The post MMUG12: Talk about Percona Toolkit and the new features of MySQL 5.7 first appeared on Simon J Mudd's Blog.

MySQL replication isn’t perfect and sometimes our data gets out of sync, either by a failure in replication or human intervention. We are all familiar with Percona Toolkit’s pt-table-checksum and pt-table-sync to help us check and fix data inconsistencies – but imagine the following scenario where we mix regular replication with the Tungsten Replicator:

We have regular replication going from master (db1) to 4 slaves (db2, db3, db4 and db5), but also we find that db3 is also master of db4 and db5 using Tungsten replication for 1 database called test. This setup is currently working this way because it was deployed some time ago when multi-source replication was not possible using regular MySQL replication. This is now a working feature in …