Percona is pleased to announce the availability of Percona Toolkit 2.2.14.  Released April 14, 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 for pt-table-checksum with better support for Percona XtraDB Cluster, various other fixes, as well as continued preparation for MySQL 5.7 compatibility. Full details are below. Downloads are available  …

I’ve started my long journey from Florianópolis, Brazil, to Santa Clara, California and I type this words while waiting for a connection flight. Next Wednesday, Daniel Guzmán Burgos and I will be presenting in the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (PLMCE).

I’m so excited with the new MySQL 101 program that has been added to this year’s event! Along the years I’ve been working as a Support Engineer at Percona I’ve heard two very distinct types of comments amongst others from some people, customers and community in general, about PLMCE:

1) That they went and it was awesome but they found it hard to follow as most of the …

Percona Toolkit is one of our most mature open source applications. Derived from Maatkit and Aspersa, Percona Toolkit has evolved significantly over the years. The software now contains 32 tools, over 4,000 tests, and has been downloaded over 250,000 times. Anyone who manages a database – from DBAs to system administrators to even software developers – benefits from Percona Toolkit’s ability to perform a variety of MySQL server and system tasks that are too difficult or complex to perform manually.

We continue to make Percona Toolkit better each month. Over the last 9 months alone Percona has had 6 releases and resolved nearly 50 issues.

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MySQL Replication is very simple to set up. In this post I’ll discuss its importance and five handy tools for monitoring and managing MySQL replication.

What is MySQL Replication? It’s the process of copying the (real-time events) data from one master instance to another slave instance and maintaining the redundant consistent data in a different machine. This enables a distributed database system that shares the same level of information.

In MySQL the replication works based on the three threads as shown below.

1) I/O thread on the slave server:  To start on receiving replication events, an I/O thread starts on the slave server and connects to the master server.

2) Master connection handler thread:  As a connection handier, master starts a thread whenever a replication slave connects to a master. The master server sends the events from its binary log file to the slave I/O thread, notifying slave …

HAProxy is frequently used as a software load balancer in the MySQL world. Peter Boros, in a past post, explained how to set it up with Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) so that it only sends queries to available nodes. The same approach can be used in a regular master-slaves setup to spread the read load across multiple slaves. However with MySQL replication, another factor comes into play: replication lag. In this case the approach mentioned for Percona XtraDB Cluster does not work that well as the check we presented only returns ‘up’ or ‘down’. We would like to be able to tune the weight of a replica inside HAProxy depending on its replication lag. This is what we will do in this post using HAProxy 1.5.

Agent …

You might have encountered situations where you had to kill some specific select queries that were running for long periods and choking the database. This post will go into more detail with an example of report query offloading.

Report query (select) offloading to a slave server is a common practice to reduce the workload of the master DB server. The long running selects will be executed in the slave for report generation. I have observed in many cases where the slave used to get delayed or the slave DB encounters a slowdown due to some heavy long-running orphaned selects from some wrong reports.

There are two main ways to kill queries in MySQL: 1. use custom scripts that match on a regular expression, or 2. use a tool written and supported by Percona that is designed to kill queries based on matching conditions. Below is one script that will help you to kill those queries. The script will take the process list from MySQL and …

MySQL table alterations can interrupt production traffic causing bad customer experience or in worst cases, loss of revenue. Not all DBAs, developers, syadmins know MySQL well enough to avoid this pitfall. DBAs usually encounter these kinds of production interruptions when working with upgrade scripts that touch both application and database or if an inexperienced admin/dev engineer perform the schema change without knowing how MySQL operates internally.

Truths
* Direct MySQL ALTER table locks for duration of change (pre-5.6)
* Online DDL in MySQL 5.6 is not always online and may incurr locks
* Even with Percona Toolkit‘s pt-online-schema-change there are several workloads that can experience blocking

Here on the Percona MySQL …

Percona is pleased to announce the availability of Percona Toolkit 2.2.12.  Released on November 14, 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. Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software …

This blog post was inspired by my visit at the annual Zabbix Conference in Riga, Latvia this year, where I gave a couple of talks on MySQL and beyond.

It was a two day single-track event with some 200 participants, a number of interesting talks on Zabbix (and related technologies) and really well-organized evening activities. I was amazed how well organized the event was and hope to be invited to speak there next year as well.   (Just in case you’re not sure what Zabbix is, it is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution for networks and applications)

I must secretly confess, it was also the first conference …

Percona Toolkit’s pt-table-checksum is a great tool to find data inconsistencies between a MySQL master and its replicas. However it is sometimes not enough to know that there are inconsistencies and let pt-table-sync fix the issue: you may want to know which exact rows are different to identify the statements that created the inconsistency. This post shows one way to achieve that goal.

The issue

Let’s assume you have 2 servers running MySQL 5.5: db1 the master and db2 the replica. You want to upgrade to MySQL 5.6 using an in-place upgrade and to play safe, you will upgrade db2 (the slave) first. If all goes well you will promote it and upgrade db1.

A good thing to do after upgrading db2 is to check for potential data …