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

Percona XtraDB Cluster is High Availability and Scalability solution for MySQL Users and based on Percona Server 5.5.17

Percona XtraDB Cluster provides:

• Synchronous replication. Transaction either commited on all nodes or none.
• Multi-master replication. You can write to any node.
• Parallel applying events on slave. Real “parallel replication”.
• Automatic node provisioning.
• Data consistency. No more unsyncronised slaves.

Percona XtraDB Cluster is fully compatible with MySQL or Percona Server in the following meaning:

• Data compatibility. Percona XtraDB Cluster works with …

I got a question a while ago about how Percona Server handles corrupted data more gracefully than the standard MySQL server from Oracle. The short version is that it won’t crash the whole server.

With standard MySQL from Oracle, if any page of data in InnoDB is found to be corrupt, the entire instance will crash forcefully. This is a good policy if you want to treat your entire data set as a single unit, which is either usable or not. However, this does not reflect reality for many users, who have a lot of data collocated in a single instance. In such cases, it is desirable for the server to continue running, so the corruption in one database does not affect the others.

Percona Server handles corruption more gracefully, if you enable it, by simply marking the single table as corrupt, and not crashing the entire server.

The relevant documentation is …

I’m happy to announce that we’ve released Percona Toolkit 2.0.1, a major new version of our essential DBA toolkit, as well as a minor bugfix update to the old 1.0.x series. You can download it from the project homepage, or install it through our RPM and DEB repositories.

Documentation is online (and the 1.0 docs are here), and you can come learn more in-person at the Washington DC Percona Live event next week. …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.60-13.1 on December 16, 2011 (Downloads are available from Percona Server 5.1.60-13.1 downloads and from the Percona Software Repositories).

Based on MySQL 5.1.60, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.60-13.1 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona ‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.1.60-13.1 milestone at Launchpad.

Bug …

Many of you have seen the announcement for our Percona Live in Washington, DC in January! But did you know we also have our highly rated MySQL Training coming to Washington, DC the week of January 16h? Full details can be found on the Percona website. If you would like to attend the MySQL Training, click here to register and receive a 20% discount.

We are pleased to announce availability of an early access version of Percona’s PAM Authentication plugin for MySQL. This plugin supports MySQL-5.5.x, Percona Server 5.5.x and MariaDB 5.2.x. The PAM Authentication plugin can be used for:

• MySQL authentication using operating system users (pam_unix)
• MySQL authentication from LDAP server (pam_ldap)
• authentication against RSA SecurID server
• any other authentication methods that provides access via PAM

We name it early access as it does not yet have the full list of features we want to implement. It is currently functional and we want to make it available for everybody. In this version you still need to create individual users in MySQL (even though they will be authenticated via PAM), in the final (non-early …

When I started with MySQL 3.22 I would start running MySQL from early beta (if not alpha) and update MySQL the same date as release would hit the web. Since that time I matured and so did MySQL ecosystem. MySQL is powering a lot more demanding and business critical applications now than 12 years ago and it also a lot more complicated product with more things which can go wrong. I see a lot fewer customers running their systems on non GA software and a lot more customers running MySQL few major version behind the most current one – if you’re not running the most demanding or quickly changing application it well might be good enough.

Many users select rather traditional/prudent approach these days and will only start considering upgrade to next major MySQL version 6+ months after release. MySQL 5.5 is out almost a year ago and I would still estimate more people running on MySQL or Percona Server 5.1 than 5.5 Facebook also sticks with …

We are happy to see that Percona Server/XtraDB and XtraBackup are raising popularity and to keep excitement we want to have more features and more performance fixes! If you are experienced software engineer and feel strong enough to hack InnoDB/XtraDB code we invite you to join our development team to work on the following (but not limited to) problems:

• Fix InnoDB flushing problems, e.g: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/09/18/disaster-mysql-5-5-flushing/
• Fix InnoDB index locking
• Figure out InnoDB adaptive locking issue, e.g: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/02/25/index-lock-and-adaptive-search-next-two-biggest-innodb-problems/
• Make …

When I mention Galera replication as in my previous post on this topic, the most popular question is how does it affect performance.

Of course you may expect performance overhead, as in case with Galera replication we add some network roundtrip and certification process. How big is it ? In this post I am trying to present some data from my benchmarks.

For tests I use tpcc-mysql, datasize 600W (~60GB) with buffer pool 52GB. Workload is run under 48 user connections.
Hardware:

• 1st node: HP ProLiant DL380 G6
• 2nd node: Dell PowerEdge R815
• Both nodes use …

It is known that MySQL due internal limitations is not able to utilize
all CPU and IO resources available on modern hardware.
Idea is to run multiple instances of MySQL to gain better performance on Fusion-io ioDrive card.

Full report is available in PDF

For tests we used tpcc-mysql package, which generates TPCC-like workload on MySQL systems.

• Server hardware: Dell PowerEdge R815
• Storage: Fusion-io ioDrive Duo 640GB MLC. Fusion-io driver version: 2.3.1 build 123; Firmware v5.0.7, rev 101971
• Software: Percona Server 5.5.15
• Client hardware: IBM x3650

Fusion-io ioDrive Duo 640GB MLC card was provided by Fusion-io.

More details on hardware and software …