This blog post discusses how you can protect your e-commerce database from a high traffic disaster.

Databases power today’s e-commerce. Whether it’s listing items on your site, contacting your distributor for inventory, tracking shipments, payments, or customer data, your database must be up, running, tuned and available for your business to be successful.

There is no time that this is more important than high-volume traffic days. There are specific events that occur throughout the year (such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Singles Day) that you know are going to put extra strain on your database environment. But these are the specific times that your database can’t go down – these are the days that can make or break your year!

So what can you do to guarantee that your database environment is up to the …

In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the basic housekeeping steps for MySQL indexes.

We all know that indexes can be the difference between a high-performance database and a bad/slow/painful query ride. It’s a critical part that needs deserves some housekeeping once in a while. So, what should you check? In no particular order, here are some things to look at:

1. Unused indexes

With sys schema, is pretty easy to find unused indexes: use the schema_unused_indexes view.

mysql> select * from sys.schema_unused_indexes;
+---------------+-----------------+-------------+
| object_schema | object_name     | index_name  |
+---------------+-----------------+-------------+
| world         | City …

In this blog post we’ll discuss pt-online-schema-change, and how to correctly use it.

Always use pt-osc?

Altering large tables can be still a problematic DBA task, even now after we’ve improved Online DDL features in MySQL 5.6 and 5.7. Some ALTER types are still not online, or sometimes just too expensive to execute on busy production master.

So in some cases, we may want to apply an

ALTER

 first on slaves, taking them out of traffic pool one by one and bringing them back after the

ALTER

 is done. In the end, we can promote one of the already altered slaves to be new master, so that the downtime/maintenance time is greatly minimized. The ex-master can be altered later, without affecting production. Of course, this method works best when the schema change is …

Vadim Tkachenko and I have been working with Fractal Tree® storage engines (Fractal Tree engines are available in Percona Server for MySQL and MongoDB as TokuDB and PerconaFT, respectively). While doing so, we’ve become interested evaluating database compression methods, to see how to make compression algorithms work even better than they do currently.  

In this blog post, I will discuss what we found in our compression research.

Introduction

Before we get to evaluation database compression methods, let’s review what compression properties are most relevant to databases in general. The first thing to consider is compression and decompression performance. Databases tend to be very sensitive to decompression performance, as it is often done in the “foreground” – …

High Availability

Have you ever wondered if your application should be able to work in read-only mode? How important is that question?

MySQL seems to be the most popular database solution for web-based products. Most typical Internet application workloads consist of many reads, with usually few writes. There are exceptions of course – MMO games for instance – but often the number of reads is much bigger then writes. So when your database infrastructure looses its ability to accept writes, either because traditional MySQL replication topology lost its master or Galera cluster lost its quorum, why would you want to the application to declare total …

We work on data recoveries quite often. In many cases, we recover table structures from the .frm files because there was no backup available. There is already a great blog post by my colleague Miguel Ángel Nieto about how we can recover structures from .frm files using MySQL utilities.

This works pretty well and we prefer to run mysqlfrm with the “–server” option to get all possible information from a .frm file. However, this option expects that MySQL is up and running so that mysqlfrm can spawn a new MySQL instance, and run the structure recovery there.

Recently I came across a tool that makes this job easier. The name of tool is …

I love graphs. They just make things easier when it comes to finding patterns. I also love visibility. Having the ability to known what is going on inside the database is priceless. How about having visibility of the slow queries execution time on a graph? Let’s do it.

We’ve already described how to get query digest using performance schema. Since the MySQL server is already doing the heavy lifting for you with little-to-no overhead, this information is available practically at will. So let’s make some graphs with that data.

To accomplish this I will use the well-known tool Graphite to store and render time-series data. For those who are not familiar with Graphite, it’s actually a 3-piece tool, consisting of:

• The …

The other day a colleague and friend of mine, Peter Boros, had a case where one of our clients had to track down the process shutting down MySQL. This blog is based on the discussion we had about that internally.

Our client wanted Peter to identify the culprit behind periodic shutdowns. This proved to be slightly more difficult than usual, for reasons that you might guess from the title of this blog.

Here is what Peter saw in the logs:

150928 15:15:33 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Normal shutdown
150928 15:15:36 [Note] Event Scheduler: Purging the queue. 0 events
150928 15:15:39 [Warning] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Forcing close of thread 411515  user: 'dashboard'
150928 15:15:40  InnoDB: Starting shutdown...
150928 15:15:59  InnoDB: Shutdown completed; log sequence number 4873840375
150928 15:16:00 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Shutdown …

Capturing data is a critical part of performing a query analysis, or even just to have an idea of what’s going on inside the database.

There are several known ways to achieve this. For example:

• Enable the General Log
• Use the Slow Log with long_query_time = 0
• Capture packets that go to MySQL from the network stream using TCPDUMP 
• Use the pt-query-digest with the –processlist parameter

However, these methods can add significant overhead and might even have negative performance consequences, such as:

Thanks to all who attended my webinar Introduction to MySQL SYS Schema. This blog is for me to address the extra questions I didn’t have time to answer on the stream.

Can i have the performance_schema enabled in 5.6 and then install the sys schema? Or they are one and the same?

You need to have enabled the performance_schema in order to use it through the sys schema. They are different entities. In general, performance_schema collects and stores the data, and sys schema reads and presents the data.

The installation of sys schema on primary database will be replicated to the slaves?

By default, no. If you wish that the Sys Schema replicates to the slaves, you can modify the before_setup.sql ( …