First, I would like to invite you to my webinar, “Monitoring All (Yes, All!) MySQL Metrics with Percona Cloud Tools,” on Wednesday, June 25 at 10 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, where I will talk on the
new features in Percona Cloud Tools, including monitoring capabilities.

In this post I’d like to show the cool and interesting things we’ve implemented in Percona Cloud Tools, including the recently released agent that Daniel also talks about here in this post.

Basically our agent allows users to collect ALL MySQL metrics plus important …

There is one new feature in MySQL 5.6 that didn’t get the attention it deserved (at least from me ) : “DATA DIRECTORY” for InnoDB tables.

This is implemented since MySQL 5.6.6 and can be used only at the creation of the table. It’s not possible to change the DATA DIRECTORY with an ALTER for a normal table (but it’s in some case with partitioned ones as you will see below). If you do so, the option will be just ignored:

mysql> CREATE TABLE `sales_figures` (
    ->   `region_id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
    ->   `sales_date` date DEFAULT NULL,
    ->   `amount` int(11) DEFAULT NULL
    -> ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
    -> DATA DIRECTORY = '/tb1/';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.11 sec)
mysql> alter table sales_figures engine=innodb data directory='/tb2/';
Query OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.21 sec)
Records: 0  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 1
mysql> show warnings; …

In my previous post, I blogged about using Percona Server with Docker and have shown you how fast and easy it was to create a virtual environment with just a few commands.

This time I will be showing you how to setup a three-node Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) 5.6 on the Docker open-source engine. Just to review Docker… “is an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere.”

In this case we will make use of a Dockerfile, think of this more like the Vagrantfile, it is a build script with a set of commands automating the creation of a new docker container.

For this case, we will use the …

There are many cool, new things happening with Percona Cloud Tools.  To avoid “tl;dr” I will highlight only one new feature after a brief, general announcement.  The new feature is a 3-minute MySQL monitor.  I’ll blog later about other features.

The general announcement is: Last week we quietly released a brand-new agent called percona-agent, and we added MySQL and system monitoring to Percona Cloud Tools.  We also wrote a brand-new API from the ground up.  We call it all “PCT v2″.  For you it means a better experience and more features, all still free while we’re in beta.

One new feature in Percona Cloud Tools v2 is MySQL monitoring in 3 minutes, i.e. a 3-minute MySQL monitor.  Let’s be honest about monitoring: We …

During April’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2014, I attended a talk on MySQL 5.7 performance an scalability given by Dimitri Kravtchuk, the Oracle MySQL benchmark specialist. He mentioned at some point that the InnoDB double write buffer was a real performance killer. For the ones that don’t know what the innodb double write buffer is, it is a disk buffer were pages are written before being written to the actual data file. Upon restart, pages in the double write buffer are rewritten to their data files if complete. This is to avoid data file corruption with half written pages. I knew it has an impact on performance, on ZFS since it is transactional I always disable it, but I never realized how important the performance impact could be. Back from PLMCE, a friend had dropped home a Dell R320 server, asking …

Database auditing is the monitoring of selected actions of database users. It doesn’t protect the database in case privileges are set incorrectly, but it can help the administrator detect mistakes.

Audits are needed for security. You can track data access and be alerted to suspicious activity. Audits are required for data integrity. They are the only way to validate that changes made to data are correct and legal.

There are several regulations that require database audits:

• Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 is a US federal law that regulates how financial data must be handled and protected.
• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, otherwise known as PCI-DSS is an international standard developed to protect cardholder’s data.
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) enacted by the U.S. Congress to protect medical and personal information.

MySQL …

I have previously written about the new replication protocol that comes with GTIDs in MySQL 5.6. Because of this new replication protocol, you can inadvertently create errant transactions that may turn any failover to a nightmare. Let’s see the problems and the potential solutions.

In short

• Errant transactions may cause all kinds of data corruption/replication errors when failing over.
• Detection of errant transactions can be done with the GTID_SUBSET() and GTID_SUBTRACT() functions.
• If you find an errant transaction on one …

Github user Adrianlzt provided a python-twisted alternative version of pyclustercheck per discussion on issue 7.

Due to sporadic performance issues noted with the original implementation in SimpleHTTPserver, the benchmarks which I’ve included as part of the project on github use mutli-mechanize library,

• cache time 1 sec
• 2 x 100 thread pools
• 60s ramp up time
• 600s total duration
• testing simulated node fail (always returns 503, rechecks mysql node on cache expiry)
• AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor
• Intel 330 SSD
• local loop back test (127.0.0.1)

The SimpleHTTPServer instance faired as follows:

…

In our previous post, we introduced the MySQL Fabric utility and said we would dig deeper into it. This post is the first part of our test of MySQL Fabric’s High Availability (HA) functionality.

Today, we’ll review MySQL Fabric’s HA concepts, and then walk you through the setup of a 3-node cluster with one Primary and two Secondaries, doing a few basic tests with it. In a second post, we will spend more time generating failure scenarios and documenting how Fabric handles them. (MySQL Fabric is an extensible framework to manage large farms of MySQL servers, with support for high-availability and sharding.)

Before we begin, we recommend you read this post by Oracle’s …

Some of us Perconians are at OpenStack summit this week in Atlanta. Matt Griffin, our director of product management, tweeted about the turbo-hipster CI talk about their experience of ALTER TABLEs running faster on Percona Server. Oracle’s Morgan Tocker then tweeted in response, asking why this was the case. I decided that the simplest way to answer that was here in this post.

The reason for this is the …