I often talk with people who are very interested in the features of Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) such as synchronous and parallel replication, multi-node writing and high availability. However some get confused when operating a real PXC cluster because they do not fully realize the implications of these features. So here is a fun way to test your PXC knowledge: try to solve these 12 questions related to PXC! (you will find the answers at the end of the post.)

Workload

1. With Galera 3.x, support for MyISAM is experimental. When can we expect to have full MyISAM support?
a. This will never happen as Galera is designed for transactional storage engines.
b. This is planned for Galera 4.0.

2. Why aren’t all workloads a good fit for PXC?
a. Execution plans can change compared to a regular MySQL server, so performance is sometimes not as good as with a regular MySQL server.
b. Large …

I have recently seen several cases when performance for MySQL queries on a single table was terrible. The reason was simple: the wrong indexes were added and so the execution plan was poor. Here are guidelines to help you optimize various kinds of single-table queries.

Disclaimer: I will be presenting general guidelines and I do not intend to cover all scenarios. I am pretty confident that you can find examples where what I am writing does not work, but I am also confident that it will help you most of the time. Also I will not discuss features you can find in MySQL 5.6+ like Index Condition Pushdown to keep things simple. Be aware that such features can actually make a significant difference in query response time (for good or for bad).

What an index can do for you

An index can perform up to 3 actions: filter, sort/group and cover. While the first 2 actions are self-explanatory, not everyone may know what …

MySQL sharding is one of the most used and surely the most abused MySQL scaling technology. My April 2 Dzone article, “To Shard, or Not to Shard,” proved there is indeed quite an interest in this topic.

As such, I’m hosting a live webinar tomorrow (April 22) that will shed light on questions about sharding with MySQL. It’s titled: To Shard or Not to Shard That is the Question!

I’ll be answering questions such as:

• Is sharding right for your application or should you use other scaling technologies?
• If you’re sharding, what things do you need to consider and which questions do you need to have answered?
• What kind of specific technologies can assist you with sharding?

I hope …

I’ve started my long journey from Florianópolis, Brazil, to Santa Clara, California and I type this words while waiting for a connection flight. Next Wednesday, Daniel Guzmán Burgos and I will be presenting in the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (PLMCE).

I’m so excited with the new MySQL 101 program that has been added to this year’s event! Along the years I’ve been working as a Support Engineer at Percona I’ve heard two very distinct types of comments amongst others from some people, customers and community in general, about PLMCE:

1) That they went and it was awesome but they found it hard to follow as most of the …

After we released pquery to the community, and as we started logging bug reports with pquery testcases, it quickly became clear that pquery binaries with statically compiled-in client libraries would be of great convenience, both for ourselves and for the community.

(If you haven’t heard about pquery yet, read the pquery introduction blog post, come and join the pquery introduction lightning talk at Percona Live (15 April just around 6PM in Hall A), or keep an eye out for some of the upcoming episodes in the …

Two years ago Ovais Tariq had explained in detail what kinds of problems existed before MySQL introduced metadata locks in 5.5.3 and how these locks help to prevent them. Still, some implications of metadata locking in MySQL remain unclear for users – DBAs and even software developers that target recent MySQL versions. I’ve decided to include a slide or two into the presentation about InnoDB locks and deadlocks I plan to make (with my colleague Nilnandan Joshi) on April 16 at Percona Live 2015.

I decided to do this as …

MySQL QA Episode #1: Bash/GNU Tools & Linux Upskill & Scripting Fun

This episode consists of 13 parts, and an introduction. See videos below

In HD quality (set your player to 720p!)

Introduction

Part 1: echo, ls, cp, rm, vi, cat, df, du, tee, cd, clear, uname, date, time, cat, mkdir

Part 2: find, wc, sort, shuf, tr, mkdir, man, more

Part 3: Redirection, tee, stdout, stderr, /dev/null, cat

Part 4: Vars, ‘ vs “, $0, $$, $!, screen, chmod, chown, export, set, whoami, sleep, kill, sh, grep, sudo, su, pwd

Part 5: grep, regex (regular expressions), tr

Part 6: sed, regex (regular expressions)

Part 7: awk

Part 8: xargs

Part 9: subshells, shells, …

Welcome to the MySQL QA Training Series!

If you have not read our introductory blog post on pquery yet, I’d recommend reading that one first to get a bit of background. The community is enthuastic about pquery, and today I am happy to announce a full training series on pquery and more. Whether you are a Linux or MySQL newbie or a seasoned QA engineer, there is something here for you. From Bash scripting (see episode 1 below), to every aspect of the new pquery framework, it is my hope that you enjoy this series. If you do, please leave us a comment

Database quality assurance is not as straightforward as it may seem. It’s not a matter of point-and-click, but rather of many intertwined tools and scripts. Beyond that, due to the complexity of the underlying product, it’s about having an overall plan or …

My webinar “Multi-threaded Replication in MySQL 5.6 and 5.7″ on February 25 generated several excellent questions following the presentation (available here for playback along with the slides). I didn’t have time to answer many of the questions during the session and so in this post I answer all of them. Thanks to everyone who attended!

Q: What do you expect from MTS with logical clock? Do you think performance would be good as with per database?
A: MTS with 5.6 is not usable if you have a single database. I do not have numbers, but this is quite frequent. With 5.7 everyone should be able to benefit from multi-threaded replication.

Q: When MySQL 5.6 was released, performance of MTS was lower, than in 5.5, for example. Is this addressed now?
A: I am not sure which …

From time to time people wonder how to implement roles in MySQL. This can be useful for companies having to deal with many user accounts or for companies with tight security requirements (PCI or HIPAA for instance). Roles do not exist in regular MySQL but here is an example on how to emulate them using Percona Server, the PAM plugin and proxy users.

The goal

Say we have 2 databases: db1 and db2, and we want to be able to create 3 roles:

• db1_dev: can read and write on db1 only.
• db2_dev: can read and write on db2 only.
• stats: can read on db1 and db2

For each role, we will create one user: joe (db1_dev), mike (db2_dev) and tom (stats).

Setting up the Percona PAM plugin

The Percona PAM plugin is distributed with Percona Server 5.5 and 5.6. I will be using …