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 …

DBAs often encounter situations where they need to kill queries to ensure there are no long-running queries on a MySQL server that would impact performance. Long-running queries can be the result of many factors. Fortunately, Percona Server contains some handy tools to remove problematic MySQL processes. I will highlight all of the tools via some examples in this post.

pt-kill:
There have been some good posts on this blog about the pt-kill tool, like this one by Arunjith Aravindan titled “How a set of queries can be killed in MySQL using Percona Toolkit’s pt-kill.” Let’s dive into pt-kill a bit further with a few more …

If you use Percona Server 5.5 and you have configured it to use multiple buffer pool instances than sooner or later you’ll see the following lines on the server’s error log and chances are you’ll be worried about them:

InnoDB: detected cycle in LRU for buffer pool 5, skipping to next buffer pool.
InnoDB: detected cycle in LRU for buffer pool 3, skipping to next buffer pool.
InnoDB: detected cycle in LRU for buffer pool 7, skipping to next buffer pool.

Worry not as this is mostly harmless. It’s becoming a February tradition for me (Fernando) to face a question about this subject (ok, it’s maybe a coincidence) and this time I’ve teamed up with my dear colleague and software engineer George Lorch to provide you the most complete blog post ever published on this topic … (with a belated thank you! to Ernie Souhrada, with whom I’ve also discussed this same …

MySQL introduced the Event Scheduler in version 5.1.6. The Event Scheduler is a MySQL-level “cron job”, which will run events inside MySQL. Up until now, this was not a very popular feature, however, it has gotten more popular since the adoption of Amazon RDS – as well as similar MySQL database as a service offerings where there is no OS level.

What is important to understand about the Event Scheduler is that it does not have any protection against multiple execution (neither does linux cron). Let’s imagine you have created an event that executes every 10 seconds, but the logic inside the event (i.e. queries or stored procedure call) can …

Global Transaction IDs (GTIDs) are one of my favorite features of MySQL 5.6. The main limitation is that you must stop all the servers at the same time to allow GTID-replication. Not everyone can afford to take a downtime so this requirement has been a showstopper for many people. Starting with Percona Server 5.6.22-72.0 enabling GTID replication can be done without almost no downtime. Let’s see how to do it.

Implementation of the Facebook patch

Finding a solution to migrate to GTIDs with no downtime is not a new idea, and several companies have already developed their own patch. The 2 best known implementations are the one from Facebook and the one from …

Being a QA Engineer, how would you feel if you had access to a framework which can generate 80+ crashes – a mix of hitting developer introduced assertions (situations that should not happen), and serious unforeseen binary crashes – for the world’s most popular open source database software – each and ever hour? What if you could do this running on a medium spec machine – even a laptop?

The seniors amongst you may object “But… generating a crash or assertion is one thing – creating a repeatable testcase for the same is quite another.”

Introducing pquery, mtr_to_sql, reducer.sh (the pquery-enabled version), and more:

80+ coredumps per hour. Fully automatic testcase creation. Near-100% testcase reproducibility. C++ core. 15 Seconds run time per trial. Up to 20-25k lines of SQL executed per trial. CLI testcases. Compatible with sporadic issues. High-end automation of many aspects.

It all …

MySQL 5.6 allows you to execute replicated events in parallel as long as data is split across several databases. This feature is named “Multi-Threaded Slave” (MTS) and it is easy to enable by setting slave_parallel_workers to a > 1 value. However if you decide to use MTS without GTIDs, you may run into annoying issues. Let’s look at two of them.

Skipping replication errors

When replication stops with an error, a frequent approach is to “ignore now and fix later.” This means you will run SET GLOBAL sql_slave_skip_counter=1 to be able to restart replication as quickly as possible and later use pt-table-checksum/pt-table-sync to resync data on the slave.

Then the day when I hit:

mysql> show slave status;
[...]
Last_SQL_Error: Worker 0 failed executing transaction '' at master log mysql-bin.000017, end_log_pos 1216451; Error 'Duplicate entry '1001' for key 'PRIMARY'' on query. …

Mydumper is known as the faster (much faster) mysqldump alternative. So, if you take a logical backup you will choose Mydumper instead of mysqldump. But what about the restore? Well, who needs to restore a logical backup? It takes ages! Even with Myloader. But this could change just a bit if we are able to take advantage of Fast Index Creation.

As you probably know, Mydumper and mysqldump export the struct of a table, with all the indexes and the constraints, and of course, the data. Then, Myloader and MySQL import the struct of the table and import the data. The most important difference is that you can configure Myloader to import the data using a certain amount of threads. The import steps are:

1. Create the complete struct of the table
2. Import the data

When you execute Myloader, internally it first creates the tables executing the “-schema.sql” files and then takes all the filenames …

As a MySQL DBA/consultant, it is part of my job to decode the MySQL binary logs – and there are a number of reasons for doing that. In this post, I’ll explain how you can get the important information about your write workload using MySQL row-based binary logs and a simple awk script.

First, it is important to understand that row-based binary logs contain the actual changes done by a query. For example, if I run a delete query against a table, the binary log will contain the rows that were deleted. MySQL provides the mysqlbinlog utility to decode the events stored in MySQL binary logs. You can read more about mysqlbinlog in detail in the reference manual here.

The following example illustrates how mysqlbinlog displays row events that specify data modifications. These correspond to events with the WRITE_ROWS_EVENT, UPDATE_ROWS_EVENT, …