Welcome to the 10th episode in the MySQL QA series! Today we’ll talk about reproducing and simplifying: How to get it Right.

Note that unless you are a QA engineer stuck on a remote, and additionally difficult-to-reproduce or difficult-to-reduce bug, this episode will largely be non-interesting for you.

However, what you may like to see – especially if you watched episodes 7 (and possibly 8 and 9) – is how reducer automatically generates handy start/stop/client (cl) etc. scripts, all packed into a handy bug tarball, in combination with the reduced SQL testcase.

This somewhat separate part is covered directly after the introduction (ends at 11:17), as well as with an example towards the end of the video (starts at time index 30:35).

The “in between part” (11:17 to 30:35) is all about reproducing and simplifying, which – unless you are working on a remote case – can likely be skipped by …

MySQL 5.7 comes with a new set of features and multi-source replication is one of them. In few words this means that one slave can replicate from different masters simultaneously.

During the last couple of months I’ve been playing a lot with this trying to analyze its potential in a real case that I’ve been facing while working with a customer.

This was motivated because my customer is already using multi-sourced slaves with Tungsten Replicator and I wanted to do a side-by-side comparison between Tungsten Replicator and Multi-source Replication in MySQL 5.7

Consider the following scenario:

DB1 is our main master attending mostly writes from several applications, it also needs to serve read …

Welcome to MySQL QA Episode 9. This episode will go more in-depth into reducer.sh: Reducing Testcases for Experts: multi-threaded reducer.sh

We will explore how to use reducer.sh to do true multi-threaded testcase reduction – a world’s first.

Topics:

1. Expert configurable variables & their default reducer.sh settings
   1. PQUERY_MULTI
   2. PQUERY_MULTI_THREADS
   3. PQUERY_MULTI_CLIENT_THREADS
   4. PQUERY_MULTI_QUERIES
   5. PQUERY_REVERSE_NOSHUFFLE_OPT

Full-screen viewing @ 720p resolution recommended.

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Thank you for attending my July 15 webinar, “Creating Best in Class Backup solutions for your MySQL environment.” Due to the amount of content we discussed and some minor technical difficulties faced near the end of webinar we have decided to cover the final two slides of the presentation along with the questions asked by attendees during the webinar via this blog post.

The slides are available for download. And you can watch the webinar in it’s entirety here.

The final two slides were about our tips for having a …

Welcome to MySQL QA Episode 8: Reducing Testcases for Engineers: tuning reducer.sh

1. Advanced configurable variables & their default/vanilla reducer.sh settings
   1. FORCE_SKIPV
   2. FORCE_SPORADIC
   3. TIMEOUT_COMMAND & TIMEOUT_CHECK
   4. MULTI_THREADS
   5. MULTI_THREADS_INCREASE
   6. QUERYTIMEOUT
   7. STAGE1_LINES
   8. SKIPSTAGE
   9. FORCE_KILL
2. Some examples
   1. FORCE_SKIPV/FORCE_SPORADIC
   2. TIMEOUT_COMMAND/TIMEOUT_CHECK

Full-screen viewing @ 720p resolution recommended.

The post MySQL QA Episode 8: Reducing Testcases for Engineers: tuning reducer.sh …

Welcome to MySQL QA Episode #7 – Reducing Testcases for Beginners: single-threaded reducer.sh!

In this episode we’ll learn how to use reducer.sh. Topics discussed;

1. reducer.sh introduction/concepts
2. Basic configurable variables & their default reducer.sh settings
   1. INPUTFILE options
   2. MODE=x
   3. TEXT=”text”
   4. WORKDIR_LOCATION & WORKDIR_M3_DIRECTORY
   5. MYEXTRA
   6. MYBASE
   7. PQUERY_MOD & PQUERY_LOC
   8. MODE5_COUNTTEXT, MODE5_ADDITIONAL_TEXT & MODE5_ADDITIONAL_COUNTTEXT
   9. How to learn more about each of the settings
3. Manual example
4. Introduction to the script’s self-recursion concept – subreducer
5. Quick setup re-cap, details of an already executed QA run
6. Examples from …

Have you ever wondered what could happen if your MySQL database goes down?

Although it’s evident such a crash will cause downtime – and surely some business impact in terms of revenue – can you do something to reduce this impact?

The simple answer is “yes” by doing regular backups (of course) but are you 100% sure that your current backup strategy will really come through when an outage occurs? And how much precious time will pass (and how much revenue will be lost) before you get your business back online?

I usually think of backups as the step after HA fails. Let’s say we’re in M<>M replication and something occurs that kills the db but the HA can’t save the day. Let’s pretend that the UPS fails and those servers are completely out. You can’t failover; you have to restore data. Backups are a key piece of “Business Continuity.” Also factor in the frequent need to restore data that’s been …

I recently helped a customer figure out why a minor version MySQL upgrade was indicating that some tables needed to be rebuilt. The mysql_upgrade program should be run for every upgrade, no matter how big or small the version difference is, but when only the minor version changes, I would normally not expect it to require tables to be rebuilt.

Turns out some of their tables were still marked with an older MySQL version, which could mean a few things… most likely that something went wrong with a previous upgrade, or that the tables were copied from a server with an older version.

In cases like this, did you know there is a fast, safe and simple way to check the version associated with a table? You can do this by reading the FRM file, following the format specification found here.

If you look at that page, you’ll see that the …

Welcome to MySQL QA Episode 3: “Debugging: GDB, Backtraces, Frames and Library Dependencies”

In this episode you’ll learn how to use debugging tool GDB. The following debugging topics are covered:

1. GDB Introduction
2. Backtrace, Stack trace
3. Frames
4. Commands & Logging
5. Variables
6. Library dependencies
7. c++filt
8. Handy references
– GDB Cheat sheet (page #2): https://goo.gl/rrmB9i
– From Crash to testcase: https://goo.gl/3aSvVW

Also expands on live debugging & more. In HD quality (set your player to 720p!)

The post MySQL QA Episode 3: How to use the debugging tool GDB appeared first on …

When a new version of MySQL is about to be released we read a lot of blog posts about the performance and scalability improvements. That’s good but sometimes we miss some small features that can help us a lot in our day-to-day tasks. One good example is the blog post that Aurimas wrote about a new small feature in MySQL 5.6 that I didn’t know about until I read it: the Automatic InnoDB transaction log file size change. How cool is that?

I plan to write a series of blog posts that will show some of those small new features in MySQL 5.7 that are going to be really useful. I’m going to start with EXPLAIN FOR CONNECTION.

This feature allows us to run an EXPLAIN for an already running statement. Let’s say that you find a query …