… or what I should keep in mind in case of disaster

To retrieve and maintain in SQL format the definition of all tables in a database, is a best practice that we all should adopt. To have that under version control is also another best practice to keep in mind.

While doing that may seem redundant, it can become a life saver in several situations. From the need to review what has historically changed in a table, to knowing who changed what and why… to when you need to recover your data and have your beloved MySQL instance not start…

But let’s be honest, only a few do the right thing, and even fewer keep that information up to date. Given that’s the case, what can we do when we have the need to discover/recover the table structure?

From the beginning, MySQL has used some external files to describe its internal structure.

For instance, if I have a schema named windmills and a table …

We see sometimes at customers that they have very big InnoDB system tablespace files (ibdata1) although they have set innodb_file_per_table = 1.

So we want to know what else is stored in the InnoDB system tablespace file ibdata1 to see what we can do against this unexpected growth.

First let us check the size of the ibdata1 file:

# ll ibdata1 
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 109064486912 Dez  5 19:10 ibdata1

The InnoDB system tablespace is about 101.6 Gibyte in size. This is exactly 6'656'768 InnoDB blocks of 16 kibyte block size.

So next we want to analyse the InnoDB system tablespace ibdata1 file. For this we can use the tool innochecksum:

# innochecksum --page-type-summary ibdata1 
Error: Unable to lock file:: ibdata1
fcntl: Resource temporarily unavailable

But... the tool …

We see sometimes at customers that they have very big InnoDB system tablespace files (ibdata1) although they have set innodb_file_per_table = 1.

So we want to know what else is stored in the InnoDB system tablespace file ibdata1 to see what we can do against this unexpected growth.

First let us check the size of the ibdata1 file:

# ll ibdata1 
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 109064486912 Dez  5 19:10 ibdata1

The InnoDB system tablespace is about 101.6 Gibyte in size. This is exactly 6'656'768 InnoDB blocks of 16 kibyte block size.

So next we want to analyse the InnoDB system tablespace ibdata1 file. For this we can use the tool innochecksum:

# innochecksum --page-type-summary ibdata1 
Error: Unable to lock file:: ibdata1
fcntl: Resource temporarily unavailable

But... the tool …

Percona announces the release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.24-26 on December 4, 2018 (downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). This release merges changes of MySQL 5.7.24, including all the bug fixes in it. Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.24-26 is now the current GA release in the 5.7 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free.

This release includes fixes to the following upstream CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures): CVE-2016-9843, CVE-2018-3155, …

Continuing on the series of blog posts about MySQL High Availability, today we will talk about stale reads and how to overcome this issue.

The Problem

Stale reads is a read operation that fetches an incorrect value from a source that has not synchronized an update operation to the value (source Wiktionary).

A practical scenario is when your application applies INSERT or UPDATE data to your master/writer node, and has to read it immediately after. If this particular read is served from another server in the replication/cluster topology, the data is either not there yet (in case of an INSERT) or it still provides the old value (in case of an UPDATE).

If your application or part of your application …

Partitioning is a way of splitting the actual data down into separate .ibd files (data compartments) in the file system based on the defined ranges using the partitioning key. It can help us with maintaining the enormous amount of data in different partitions without much hassle.

In this blog post, we are going to see how to manage table partitioning using yahoo partition manager.

Needs for partitioning:

• Enhanced data retrieval ( reduced IO ) with smaller B+Tree.
• Easy Archival or Purge by dropping or truncate  of partition
• Lesser fragmentation, hence avoiding frequent table optimization.

Partitions management activity like adding/Dropping partition is made easy and automated by …

Over the last year, I have been pursuing a part time hobby project exploring ways to squeeze as much data as possible in MySQL. As you will see, there are quite a few different ways. Of course things like compression ratio matters a lot but, other items like performance of inserts, selects and updates, along with the total amount of bytes written are also important. When you start combining all the possibilities, you end up with a large set of compression options and, of course, I am surely missing a ton. This project has been a great learning opportunity and I hope you’ll enjoy reading about my results. Given the volume of results, I’ll have to write a series of posts. This post is the first of the series. I also have to mention that some of my work overlaps work done by one of my colleague, Yura Sorokin, in a …

I am currently working my way through the many PHP Frameworks to see how they get on with MySQL 8.  The Frameworks that can take advantage of the MySQL Improved Extension or mysqli can take advantage of the SHA256 Caching Authentication method. But those that are PDO based need to use the older MySQL Native Authentication method.

I wanted to check the PDO based frameworks and today I just happened to be wearing the very nice Symfony shirt I received as part of my presentation at Symfony USA.  So I started with a fresh install of Symfony.  All was going well until it came time to get it to work with MySQL 8 through Doctrine.

Doctrine
Symfony uses Doctrine as an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) and DBAL  (Database Abstraction Layer) as an intermediary to the database.  While I myself am not a big fan of ORMs …

Design A Highly Available MySQL Clusters With Orchestrator And ProxySQL In GCP — Part 2

In part1, we explained how we are going to approach the HA setup. Here we can see how to install and configure Orchestrator and ProxySQL, then do the failover testing.

Install and configure MySQL Replication:

We need a MySQL with 4 Read replica and the 4'th replica will have a replica for it. And we must have to use GTID replication. Because once the master failover done, the remaining replicas will start replicating from the new master. Without GTID its not possible, but as an alternate Orchestrator provides Pseudo-GTID.

VM Details: …

Tweet

If you have an application that need to use multiple connections to the MySQL database for short periods of times, it can be a good to use a connection pool to avoid creating a new connection and going through the whole authentication process every time a connection is needed. For the Python Database API (PEP249), MySQL Connector/Python has had support for connection pools for a long time. With the release of MySQL 8.0.13, the new X DevAPI also has support for connection pools.

This blog will first cover the background of the X DevAPI connection pool feature in MySQL Connector/Python. Then …