The performance_schema is a powerful tool for analyzing MySQL performance and behavior. One aspect of the performance_schema is that the view of the data is "right now", and very little historical information is present. You can see that there are 10 threads connected right now, but what about five minutes ago?

ps_history
ps_history is a set of stored routines and events for periodically collecting the data in the performance_schema into another schema called ps_history. The ps_history schema contains a copy of each performance_schema view as a real table, and timestamp and server_id columns have been added to each table. Periodically (by default every 30 seconds) the performance_schema data is written into the history tables.

ps_history comes as one script (setup.sql) which will create the ps_history schema, the tables within it, and …

For months when speaking with customers I have been positioning Percona Cloud Tools (PCT) as a valuable tool for the DBA/Developer/SysAdmin but only recently have I truly been able to harness the data and make a technical recommendation to a customer that I feel would have been very difficult to accomplish otherwise.

Let me provide some background: I was tasked with performing a Performance Audit for one of our customers (Performance Audits are extremely popular as they allow you to have a MySQL Expert confirm or reveal challenges within your MySQL environment and make your database run faster!) and as part of our …

We have been using SHOW ENGINE INNODB MUTEX command for years. It shows us mutex and rw-lock information that could be useful during service troubleshooting in case of performance problems. As Morgan Tocker announced in his blog post the command will be removed from MySQL 5.7 and we have to use performance_schema to get that info.

The documentation of MySQL also says that most of the command output has been removed from 5.6 and that we can find similar info in performance_schema. It doesn’t show any examples of how to use performance_schema or what is the query we need to use from now on. It is also important to mention that 5.6 doesn’t show any warning about the feature being deprecated.

This is a short blog post to show how to configure performance_schema and get the info we need. Hoping it will end …

Some time ago, Peter Zaitsev posted a blog titled “How well does your table fits in innodb buffer pool?” He used some special INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables developed for Percona Server 5.1 to report how much of each InnoDB table and index resides in your buffer pool.

As Peter pointed out, you can use this view into the buffer pool to watch a buffer pool warm up with pages as you run queries. You can also use it for capacity planning. If you expect some tables need to be fully loaded in the buffer pool to be used efficiently, but the buffer pool isn’t large enough to hold them, then it’s time to increase the size of the buffer pool.

The problem, however, was that system tables change from version to version. Specifically, the INNODB_BUFFER_POOL_PAGES_INDEX table no longer exists in Percona Server 5.6, and the …

Today I was doing some tests with XA transactions in MySQL 5.6.

The output of the XA RECOVER command to list transactions was hard to read because of the representation of the data column:

The good news is that 5.7 has transaction information in performance_schema:

mysql> select trx_id, isolation_level, state, xid, xa_state, access_mode 
    -> from performance_schema.events_transactions_current;
+-----------------+-----------------+--------+--------+----------+-------------+
| trx_id          | isolation_level | state  | xid    | xa_state | access_mode |
+-----------------+-----------------+--------+--------+----------+-------------+
|            NULL | REPEATABLE READ | ACTIVE | x-1    | PREPARED | READ WRITE  |
| 421476507015704 | REPEATABLE READ | …

One of great innovation in MySQL 5.7 is memory summary tables в Performance Schema and corresponding views in sys schema

And as troubleshooting freak I have huge reason to greet this feature.

Before version 5.7 we had very limited abilities to diagnose memory issues in MySQL. We could use operating system tools, such as vmstat, top, free, but they only showed what MySQL server uses memory, but do not show how. In version 5.7 things changed.

Lets examine what can we study about memory usage by MySQL Server.

At first, this is total amount of memory, used by all internal MySQL structures:

mysql> select * from …

When I talk about troubleshooting I like to repeat: "Don't grant database access to everybody!" This can sound a bit weird having one can give very limited read-only access.

But only if ignore the fact what even minimal privileges in MySQL allows to change session variables, including those which control server resources. My favorite example is "Kill MySQL server with join_buffer_size". But before version 5.7 I could only recommend this, but not demonstrate. Now, with help of memory summary tables in Performance Schema, I can show how unprivileged user can let your server to use great amount of swap.

At first lets create a user account with minimal privileges and login.

$../client/mysql -ulj -h127.0.0.1 -P13001
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 10
Server version: 5.7.6-m16-debug-log Source distribution

…

I have been working with MySQL for some time and it has changed significantly from what I was using in 5.0 to what we have now in 5.6. One of the biggest handicap we’ve had in the past is to not be able to see what MySQL is doing or why. MySQL 5.5 introduced us … Continue reading pstop – a top-like program for MySQL (based on performance_schema)

When I queried information_schema.innodb_trx (introduced in 5.1 with the InnoDB Plugin) I noticed there were a few transactions in LOCK WAIT state.

Example:

mysql [information_schema] > select trx_id,trx_state 

-> from information_schema.innodb_trx;
+--------+-----------+
| trx_id | trx_state |
+--------+-----------+
| 7974   | LOCK WAIT |
| 7962   | RUNNING   |
+--------+-----------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Then I made a query to join a few information_schema and performance_schema tables to find out which query was blocking my transactions. It turned out that the blocking transaction had a trx_query=NONE. So my query was block by a transaction doing nothing. That's not really helpful.

Let's try to recreate the situation and see exactly what happened. I'll use two sessions for the transactions and a third to monitor the server.
…

I’ve just released the 1.1.0 version of the MySQL sys schema.

This release is hugely pleasing to me, in that I actually didn’t have to do too much work on it myself! There were a significant number of contributions from Jesper Wisborg Krogh and Arnaud Adant, both MySQL Support Engineers (at the time at least, Arnaud has moved on to pastures new now), as well as again from Joe Grasse.

Thank you all for your contributions!

Here’s a summary of the changes:

Improvements

• Added host summary views, which have the same structure as the user summary views, but aggregated by host instead (Contributed by Arnaud Adant)
  • host_summary
  • host_summary_by_file_io_type
  • host_summary_by_file_io
  …