Most of the Nagios plugins included with the Percona Monitoring Plugins are purpose-built for specific scenarios that I found in my research to be frequent, severe, or subtle causes of problems in MySQL systems. They are intentionally not generic because I wanted to focus on doing one thing with each plugin, and doing it excellently. This makes the plugins easier to set up and use, and I believe it should help avoid some of the common problems such as spammy alerts.

There is one “generic, flexible” plugin, however, which you can use for fairly arbitrary checks of status counters and variables. This is the …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo is going to be awesome! Great speakers, an A-list of sponsors, countless opportunities to engage with the community, and an enthusiastic crowd of MySQL users ensure this is going to be a great event. The conference features 72 breakout sessions, keynotes by leading industry luminaries, an optional day of 16 tutorial sessions, a bustling exhibit hall, and numerous opportunities to connect with other community members.

I am pleased to announce the conference Birds of a Feather sessions and Lightning Talks. Birds of a Feather sessions will be Tuesday and Wednesday nights following the evening receptions. Lightning Talks will be …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.21-25.0 on March 20th, 2012. Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories.

Based on MySQL 5.5.21, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.21-25.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.5.21-25.0 milestone at Launchpad.

Full release notes are available in the …

I am writing a specification for updating pt-online-schema-change. The outline of the changes I want to make is here: http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/ptdev:blueprints:redesign-pt-online-schema-change

The idea is to make the tool Do The Right Thing, with features such as automatically throttling its operation to avoid causing replicas to lag. Many of the features and improvements are similar to those added to the newly rewritten pt-table-checksum.

If you have any comments on it, please write to the mailing list with your suggestions. Thanks!

Percona Toolkit version 2.0.4 is available for immediate download. This release fixes 25 bugs and is a bug-fix release only, with the exception of a minor new filtering option for pt-kill. The change log is available on Launchpad. There are links to the documentation, downloads, bug reporting system, and mailing list on the toolkit homepage.

Percona Toolkit is open-source and free, but we recommend a support contract, which entitles you to bug fixes and assistance using the tools, among other benefits.

With this release we are introducing a new release model, which matches most people’s expectations of a software lifecycle. We will place all new features into the upcoming series (currently the 2.1 …

Percona is glad to announce the second beta release towards Percona XtraBackup 2.0! We call this version 1.9.1 as we are using the 1.9.x version numbers for betas of 2.0 to clearly differentiate beta releases from the final 2.0 release. We do not recommend using Beta releases in production. Link to BETA version and Release notes.

If you are looking for a stable release for production use, check out our latest stable release (which was 1.6.5 at the time of writing).

This beta adds some really exciting features and bug fixes.

New features include:

• Backup and restore of LRU dump.
  For servers that support …

We are on our way to delivery a production ready release of Percona XtraDB Cluster by the end March-2012.
We will do couple events to cover features and architecture of XtraDB Cluster.

• I will give a talk on San Francisco MySQL Meetup, on March-21: Percona’s new HA solution for MySQL with XtraDB Cluster. If you are in the area, I hope to see you there. I will give away some good stuff, including free copies of our new book: High Performance MySQL, 3rd edition
• Webinar on April-4 A New High Availability Solution for MySQL

. If you are not in San Francisco and can’t not make to …

I am happy to announce the availability of beta release of our new product Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Percona XtraDB Cluster is High Availability and Scalability solution for MySQL Users and the beta release is based on Percona Server 5.5.20 and the recently released Galera 2.0 GA

The main focus in this release:

• Incremental State Transfer, especially useful for WAN deployments
• Support of Percona XtraBackup for Snapshot State Transfer. This feature is available in pre-release series for XtraBackup 2.0

Despite Galera 2.0 has status “production ready”, we still …

DBD::mysql 4.014 breaks pt-table-checksum 2.0.  The cause is unknown, but the effect is a lot of errors like:

DBD::mysql::st execute failed: called with 2 bind variables when 6 are needed [for Statement "..." with ParamValues: ...] at ./pt-table-checksum line 7216.

The fix is simple: upgrade (or even downgrade) DBD::mysql to any version except 4.014. To see which version of DBD::mysql a system has, execute:

perl -MDBD::mysql -e 'print $DBD::mysql::VERSION, "\n";'

This bug may affect other Percona Toolkit tools, but currently pt-table-checksum 2.0 is the only victim. This bug does not affect pt-table-checksum 1.0, and it cannot be worked around in pt-table-checksum 2.0 because the bug in in DBD::mysql.

This bug affects …

We’ve released a new set of monitoring plugins for MySQL servers and related software. With these plugins, you can set up world-class graphing and monitoring for your MySQL servers, using your own on-premises Cacti and Nagios software. The Cacti plugins are derived from an existing set of templates we’ve been using for several years, but the Nagios check plugins are brand new. They are informed by the research we did into the causes and preventions of MySQL downtime.

Like all Percona software, the plugins are open-source and free, licensed under the GNU GPL. The source code and issue tracker are hosted at …