I’m looking forward to next week’s MySQL webinar with Robert Hodges, CEO of Continuent. We’ll be speaking on the topic “Multi-Data Center MySQL with Continuent Tungsten.”

You’re not alone if you’ve been vexed when trying to assemble multi-master, multi-site MySQL clusters. Whether that was a move from a single database server to a scalable cluster, or from a brittle MySQL replication system to a transparent, manageable database cluster.

We’ve all been there at one point or another in our careers. So learn from our experience. In our joint webinar next week (Dec. 11), Robert and I will …

INFORMATION_SCHEMA is usually the place to go when you want to get facts about a system (how many tables do we have? what are the 10 largest tables? What is data size and index size for table t?, etc). However it is also quite common that such queries are very slow and create lots of I/O load. Here is a tip to avoid theses hassles: set innodb_stats_on_metadata to OFF.

This is a topic we already talked about, but given the number of systems suffering from INFORMATION_SCHEMA slowness, I think it is good to bring innodb_stats_on_metadata back on the table.

The problem

Let’s look at a system I’ve seen recently: MySQL 5.5, working set fitting in memory but not the whole dataset, around 4000 InnoDB tables.

The I/O load is very light as …

We have always received quite few questions here at Percona Support on how to avoid the dreaded “Too many connections” error, as well as what is the recommended value for max_connections. So, in this article I will try to cover best possible answers to these questions so others can mitigate similar kinds of issues.

My colleague Aurimas wrote a wonderful post some time back about changing max_connections value via GDB when MySQL server is running to get rid of the “Too many connections” error without restarting MySQL. You can check here for details.

By default 151 is the …

Recently, I helped a client that was having issues with deployments causing locking in their production databases.  At a high level, the two key components used in the environment were:

• Capistrano (scripted deployments) [website]
• Liquibase (database version control) [website]

At a high level, they currently used a CLI call to Liquibase as a sub-task within a larger deployment task.  The goal of this engagement was to modify that sub-task to run Liquibase in a non-blocking fashion as opposed to the default that just runs native ALTERS against the database.

As I wasn’t very familiar with Liquibase, I took this opportunity to learn more about it and it seems like a very valuable tool.  Essentially, it does the following:

• Adds two version control tables to …

This is part two on a two-part series on the performance implications of in-flight data encryption with MySQL. In the first part, I focused specifically on the impact of using MySQL’s built-in SSL support with some rather surprising results. Certainly it was expected that query throughput would be lower with SSL than without, but I was rather surprised by the magnitude of the performance hit incurred at connection setup time. These results naturally lended themselves to some further investigation; in particular, I wanted to compare performance differences between MySQL’s built-in SSL encryption facilities and external encryption technologies, such as SSH tunneling. I’ll also be using this post to address a couple of questions posed in the comments on my original article. So, without further ado….

Test Environment

The …

Sphinx is a free, open-source search server that integrates nicely with MySQL. It provides a fast, scalable, and pluggable search framework. The Sphinx engine possesses a variety of tools enabling you to customize how searching/indexing interacts with or becomes a part of your environment.

Join me and Sphinx Search CEO/CTO Andrew Aksyonoff, the founder and creative force behind Sphinx, on Wednesday, November 20th at 10 a.m. PST as we discuss how to get started with Sphinx and seamlessly integrate it into your applications and MySQL. The title of our webinar is, “How to Optimally Configure Sphinx Search for MySQL” and you can register …

8PM. One of the servers found a critical bug. Hop online and discuss, log bug. 10PM. Patch ready. 10:30PM. New build ready. 10:45PM. New RQG run initiated. This was by no means an uncommon sight during the months of testing that went into Percona Server 5.6, in fact it was commonplace.

At a certain point, we had 3 very high end servers (modern cpu’s, heaps of cores and memory), all equipped with either fast SSD’s or Fusion-io flash storage, executing thousands of trials, 8 in parallel per server, each executing 1 to 25 mysql threads per running mysqld instance.

And that was just the final months of testing. Before that much work was done on finding “every last bug out there”. We discovered many bugs in both upstream (Oracle’s MySQL 5.6) and in Percona Server 5.6. I personally logged around 100 bugs, but the total count would be much higher still.

My colleague …

How do we ensure that, when we have 35+ testable option combinations for mysqld, we test each and every combination of them? For example: will a different innodb_log_file_size combined with more innodb_log_files_in_group and a modified innodb_fast_shutdown setting truly not affect Percona’s log archiving feature?

Most option-related bugs are caused by the setting of 1 or 2 mysqld options to a non-standard value. Maybe in an odd situation 3 mysqld options need to be set in combination. So, starting with 2 option combinations (1 option set is easy to calculate: it matches the number of options to be tested), let’s see how many combinations we would have to run: 35^2 = 1225 combinations. aa, ab, ac, …. ba, bb, bc… etc.

In real life mysqld testing, this is not entirely true as one would never specify “aa” in relation to …

This post builds on the How to obtain the “LES” (Last Executed Statement) from an Optimized Core Dump? post written about a year ago.

A day after that post was released, Shane Bester wrote an improved version, How to obtain all executing queries from a core file on his blog. Reading that post is key to understanding what follows.

I am faced with some complex bugs which would do well with SQL testcases. Extracting the last executed statement (and maybe all queries running at the time of the crash/asserts) is crucial to generate testcases well. E.g. you may have a full SQL trace from RQG or …

A few years ago Yves Trudeau and Aleksandr Kuzminsky wrote posts about different ways for recovering orphaned .ibd files:

• Connecting orphaned .ibd files
• A recovery trivia or how to recover from a lost ibdata1 file

Today I want to show you how to do that in more easy and quick way. In my example I’ll restore a “payment.ibd” file (payment table) from Sakila DB on a server with MySQL 5.5 (but with …