Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.0-rc1 on May 7, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here. For this RC release, we will not be making APT and YUM repositories available, just base deb and RPM packages

This is an Release Candidate quality release and is not intended for production. If you want a high-quality, generally available release, the current stable version should be used (currently 2.0.7 in the 2.0 series at the time of writing).

New Features:

• This version of Percona XtraBackup has implemented full …

Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these basics.

log_slave_updates is REQUIRED

You need to have log_slave_updates enabled on the cluster node acting as async slave for replicated events from the async master to be applied to the other nodes, that is if you have more than one PXC node. This is because before Galera can create writesets for the replicated events, binlog events must be generated for the transactions first. Under …

Percona Server with TokuDB

I was excited to see that TokuDB for MySQL from Tokutek is now open source. I believe this is a great technology and it was a significant restriction on the adoption when it was distributed only in a binary format with a proprietary license.

So I went and built Percona Server 5.5.30 with TokuDB’s storage engine. This is an experimental build and I am just going to play with it. The build procedure is somewhat complicated and confusing and this stage, so I want to share it with the entire MySQL community in case you want to try it out for yourselves.

It’s available from our …

In our last 5.5 series release of Percona Server, we included a regression in the RPM packaging that prevented the server from restarting following an upgrade — instead, the server would remain stopped after the upgrade was completed regardless of its state before updating. This caused some problems for some users, especially if automatic upgrading was configured on machines with running database servers.

We’ve now fixed it and re-released to …

Percona Server for MySQL version 5.1.68-14.6

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server  5.1.68 -14.6 on April 19, 2013 (downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.68, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.68-14.6, a MySQL alternative, is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All …

Today’s blog post diving into the waters of the MySQL buffer pool is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog, and is Part 1 of 2. Thank you to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon for contributing to this project and post. We’ll be posting Part 2 on Thursday. I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo next week in Santa Clara, California so look for me there – I’d love to connect and talk more about MySQL buffer pools or anything else that’s on your mind!

There …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo begins next Monday and runs April 22-25, 2013. Attendees will see great keynotes from leaders in the industry including representatives from Oracle, Amazon Web Services, HP, Continuent, and Percona. They can also participate in thought provoking Birds of a Feather sessions on Tuesday night and the Wednesday night Community Networking Reception will be fun and entertaining with the presentation of the Community Awards and the Lightning Talks.

If you cannot attend the entire Percona Live MySQL Conference but want to take advantage of the keynotes, BOFs, and Community Networking …

In addition to the problem with trx_list scan we discussed in Friday’s post, there is another issue in InnoDB transaction processing that notably affects MySQL performance – for every transaction InnoDB creates a read view and allocates memory for this structure from heap. The problem is that the heap for that allocation is destroyed on each commit and thus the read view memory is reallocated on the next transaction.

There are two aspects of this problem:

1) memory allocation is an costly operation and if memory …

We just released our first alpha of Percona XtraBackup 2.1 for MySQL and with it we included the ability to encrypt backups on the fly (full documentation here). This feature is different than simply piping the backup stream through the openssl or gpg binaries, which is what some people have used in the past. A big benefit of using the built-in encryption is that multiple CPU cores can be used for encryption (with the --encrypt-threads option). You can also combine compression and encryption, each using multiple CPU cores.

One advantage of …

Facebook is a major user of MySQL and has pushed the performance limits of the technology. Their MySQL experts have deep, hands on knowledge of the technology. I’m pleased to welcome Mark Callaghan, Software Engineer for Database Infrastructure at Facebook, back again this year to the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo to share his expertise. Mark was a keynote speaker at last year’s conference and will appear this year with a group of Facebook MySQL experts:

• Domas Mituzas, …