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 …

Amazon has just released their RDS Migration Tool, and Pythian has recently undertaken training to use for our clients. I wanted to share my initial thoughts on the tool, give some background on its internals, and provide a walk-through on the functionality it will be most commonly used for.

There are many factors to consider when evaluating cloud service providers, including cost, performance, and high availability and disaster recovery options. One of the most critical and overlooked elements of any cloud offering though, is the ease of migration. Often, weeks are spent evaluating all of the options only to discover after the choice is made that it will take hours of expensive downtime to complete the migration, and that there is no good rollback option in the case of failure.

In order to reduce the friction inherent in the move to a DBaaS offering, Amazon has developed an RDS Migration tool. This is an in-depth look at this new …

Starting with MySQL 5.7.8, we are shipping a new client utility called mysqlpump that performs logical backups, producing a set of SQL statements that can be run to reproduce the original schema objects and table data. The goal of mysqlpump is to have a modern utility that is extendable and has native support for parallelization. …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.45-37.4 on September 2, 2015. Based on MySQL 5.5.45, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.45-37.4 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series.

Percona Server is open-source and free. Details of the release can be found in the 5.5.45-37.5 milestone on Launchpad. Downloads are available …

MySQL-Sandbox is a great tool for testing a new release, and in fact this is what I do when a new MySQL tarball becomes available. I don't think many people are aware of the full testing capabilities of the sandbox, though.
When you think about testing, you may just think of creating a sandbox with the new tarball, and then hammering it with your pet procedure. That works, of course, as the main purpose of MySQL-Sandbox is to allow you to do just that. There is, however, a full test suite that can tell you in a short while if your tarball is compatible with the past or not.
This procedure is quite strict. It has happened several times that I caught a bug in a new release of MySQL, or Percona Server, or MariaDB, just by running this suite.
How MySQL-Sandbox gets testedBefore describing how to test, I would like to show what I do. When a new version of MySQL-Sandbox is ready …

Booking.com, one of the world’s leading e-commerce companies, helps travels book nearly 1 million rooms per night. Established in 1996, Booking.com B.V. guarantees the best prices for any type of property, from small, family-run bed and breakfasts to executive apartments and five-star luxury suites.

The travel website is also a dedicated contributor to the MySQL and Perl community. Other open source technologies include CentOS Linux, Nginx, python, puppet, Git and more.

A Diamond sponsor of Percona Live Amsterdam Sept. 21-23, you can meet the people who power Booking.com at booth 205. Enter promo code “BlogInterview” at registration to save €20!

In the meantime, meet Jean-François Gagné, a system engineer at Booking.com. He’ll be presenting a couple of talks: “ …

There can be a lot of confusion and lack of planning in Percona XtraDB Clusters in regards to nodes becoming desynchronized for various reasons.  This can happen a few ways:

• An IST or SST joining node catching up after a state transfer (Joined/Joining state)
• Using wsrep_desync for something like a backup
• Executing a rolling-schema-upgrade using using wsrep_OSU_method=RSU

When I say “desynchronized” I mean a node that is permitted to build up a potentially large wsrep_local_recv_queue while some operation is happening.  For example a node taking a backup would set wsrep_desync=ON during the backup and potentially fall behind …

Previous episodes:

• MySQL replication monitoring 101

MySQL replication in action - Part 1: GTID & CoMySQL replication in action - Part 2 - Fan-in topologyMySQL replication in action - Part 3 - All-masters P2P topologyMySQL replication in action - Part 4 - star and hybrid topologies
Parallel replication overviewOne of …

In my last Booking.com Hackathon, I worked on MyISAM vs InnoDB for data loading (LOAD DATA IN FILE) and bulk index creation.  My motivation was the following: knowing that some are still using MyISAM for this particular use-case, I wanted to verify/understand if/why InnoDB is slower than MyISAM.  I do not yet have complete results on this specific subject but I found some interesting things that

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 …