Twice each year members of the global open-source community converge on London in November and Santa Clara in April to network with, and learn from, some of the world’s most experienced and accomplished system architects, developers and DBAs.

And now it’s time for YOU to give back to this diverse and growing MySQL community. The Call for Speakers for Percona Live London (Nov. 3-4) closes Aug. 17 and the deadline for submitting talks for the ever-growing Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (April 13-16, 2015) expires Nov. 9.

If you like putting things off until the last minute, then it’s time to get to work! Aug. 17 is just two days away and November will be here before you know it (think of how fast summer has gone by already).

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Diablo Technologies engaged Percona to benchmark IBM eXFlash™ DIMMs in various aspects. An eXFlash™ DIMM itself is quite an interesting piece of technology. In a nutshell, it’s flash storage, which you can put in the memory DIMM slots. Enabled by Diablo’s Memory Channel Storage™ technology, this practically means low latency and some unique performance characteristics.

These devices are special, because their full performance potential is unlocked by using multiple devices to leverage the parallelism of the memory subsystem. In a modern CPU there is more than one memory controller (4 is typical nowadays) and spreading eXFlash™ DIMMs across them will provide maximum performance. There are quite some details about the device that are omitted in this post, they can be found in this redbook.

Diablo technologies also provided us a …

Martin Arrieta and I gave an online presentation last week on “Putting MySQL Fabric To Use.” If you missed it, you can find a recording and the slides here, and the vagrant environment we used plus a transcript of the commands we ran here (be sure to check out the ‘sharding’ branch, as that’s what we used during the webinar).

Thank you all for attending and asking interesting questions. We were unable to answer all of them in the scheduled time, so here are our replies to all the questions.

What is GTID? And how does it relate to MySQL Fabric?
GTID stands for Global …

I will be presenting two webinars in August:

• Aug 6, 10 a.m. PDT: Advanced Query Tuning in MySQL 5.6 and Beyond
• Aug 13, 10 a.m. PDT:  Using Performance Schema to Monitor and Troubleshoot MySQL 5.6

This Wednesday’s webinar on advanced MySQL query tuning will be focused on tuning the “usual suspects”: queries with “Group By”, “Order By” and subqueries; those query types are usually perform bad in MySQL and add an additional load as MySQL may need to create a temporary table(s) or perform a filesort. New this year: I will talk more about new MySQL …

As we know different storage engines in MySQL have different file structures. Every table in MySQL 5.6 must have a .frm file in the database directory matching the table name. But where the rest of the data resides depends on the storage engine.

For MyISAM we have .MYI and .MYD files in the database directory (unless special settings are in place); for InnoDB we might have data stored in the single table space (typically ibdata1 in the database directory) or as file per table (or better said file per partition) producing a single file with .ibd extension for each table/partition. TokuDB as of this version (7.1.7) has its own innovative approach to storing the table contents.

I have created the table in the database test having the following structure:

CREATE TABLE `mytable` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `c` varchar(15) NOT NULL, …

One of the common causes of downtime with MySQL is running out of connections. Have you ever seen this error? “ERROR 1040 (00000): Too many connections.” If you’re working with MySQL long enough you surely have. This is quite a nasty error as it might cause complete downtime… transient errors with successful transactions mixed with failing ones as well as only some processes stopping to run properly causing various kinds of effects if not monitored properly.

There are number of causes for running out of connections, the most common ones involving when the Web/App server is creating unexpectedly large numbers of connections due to a miss-configuration or some script/application leaking connections or creating too many connections in error.

The solution I see some people employ is just to increase max_connections to some very high number so MySQL “never” runs out of connections. This however can cause …

Hi, I recently had the experience of assisting with a migration of a customer MySQL installation to Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service). Amazon RDS is a great platform for hosting your MySQL installation and offers the following list of pros and cons:

• You can scale your CPU, IOPS, and storage space separately by using Amazon RDS. Otherwise you need to take downtime and upgrade physical components of a rack-mounted server.
• Backups, software version patching, failure detection, and (some) recovery is automated with Amazon RDS.
• You lose shell access to your DB instance
• You lose SUPER privilege for regular users. Many SUPER-type statements and commands are provided for as a Stored Procedure.
• It is easy to set up multiple read replicas (slaves in READ_ONLY=1 mode).
• You can set up a secondary sychronous …

Monitoring flow control in a Galera cluster is very important. If you do not, you will not understand why writes may sometimes be stalled. Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 provides 2 status variables for such monitoring: wsrep_flow_control_paused and wsrep_flow_control_paused_ns. Which one should you use?

What is flow control?

Flow control does not exist with regular MySQL replication, but only with Galera replication. It is simply the mechanism nodes are using when they are not able to keep up with the write load: to keep replication synchronous, the node that is starting to lag instructs the other nodes that writes should be paused for some time so it does not get too far behind.

If you are not familiar with this notion, you should read this …

We designed Percona Cloud Tools (both hardware and software setup) to handle a very high-intensive MySQL write workload. For example, we already observe inserts of 1bln+ datapoints per day. So I wanted to share what kind of hardware we use to achieve this result.

Let me describe what we use, and later I will explain why.

Server:

• Chassis: Supermicro SC825TQ-R740LPB 2U Rackmount Chassis
• Motherboard: Supermicro X9DRI-F dual socket
• CPU: Dual Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge E5-2643v2 (6x 3.5Ghz cores, 12x HT cores, 25M L3)
• Memory: 256GB (16x 16GB 256-bit quad-channel) ECC registered DDR3-1600
• Raid: LSI MegaRAID 9260-4i 4-port 6G/s hardware RAID controller, 512M buffer
• MainStorage: PCIe SSD HGST FlashMAX II 4.8TB
• Secondary Storage (OS, logs): RAID 1 over 2x 3TB hard drives

I recently worked on a case where one node of a Galera cluster had its schema desynchronized with the other nodes. And that was although Total Order Isolation method was in effect to perform the schema changes. Let’s see what happened.

Background

For those of you who are not familiar with how Galera can perform schema changes, here is a short recap:

• Two methods are available depending on the value of the wsrep_OSU_method setting. Both have benefits and drawbacks, it is not the main topic of this post.
• With TOI (Total Order Isolation), a DDL statement is performed at the same point in the replication flow on all nodes, giving strong guarantees that the schema is always identical on all nodes.
• With RSU (Rolling Schema Upgrade), a DDL statement is not replicated to the other nodes. Until the DDL statement has been executed on all nodes, the schema is not consistent everywhere (so …