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 …

In the very early days of Percona Vadim wrote very nice post about GROUP_CONCAT.

But I want to show you a bit more about it.

When is GROUP_CONCAT useful? Usually while working with Support customers I recommend it when you have aggregation of many-to-many info. It makes the view simpler and more beautiful and it doesn’t need much effort to make it work.

Some simple examples:

This is a test table:

CREATE TABLE `group_c` (
`parent_id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
`child_id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB;
INSERT INTO …

Each day there is probably work done to improve performance of the InnoDB storage engine and remove bottlenecks and scalability issues. Hence there was another one I wanted to highlight:

Scalability issues due to tables without primary keys

This scalability issue is caused by the usage of tables without primary keys. This issue typically shows itself as contention on the InnoDB dict_sys mutex. Now the dict_sys mutex controls access to the data dictionary. This mutex is used at various places. I will only mention a few of them:

• During operations such as opening and closing table handles, or
• When accessing I_S tables, or
• During undo of a freshly inserted row, or
• During other data dictionary modification operations such as CREATE TABLE, or
• Within the “Persistent Stats” subsystem, among other things.

Of course this list is not exhaustive but should …

Here’s a problem some or most of us have encountered. You have a latin1 table defined like below, and your application is storing utf8 data to the column on a latin1 connection. Obviously, double encoding occurs. Now your development team decided to use utf8 everywhere, but during the process you can only have as little to no downtime while keeping your stored data valid.

CREATE TABLE `t` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `c` text,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
master> SET NAMES latin1;
master> INSERT INTO t (c) VALUES ('¡Celebración!');
master> SELECT id, c, HEX(c) FROM t;
+----+-----------------+--------------------------------+
| id | c               | HEX(c)                         |
+----+-----------------+--------------------------------+
|  3 | ¡Celebración!   | C2A143656C656272616369C3B36E21 |
+----+-----------------+--------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
master> SET …

GUI monitoring tools for MySQL are not always suitable for all our needs or situations. Most of them are designed to provide historical views into what happens to our database over time rather then real-time insight into current MySQL server status. Excellent free tools for this include Cacti, Zabbix, Ganglia, Nagios, etc. But each of them needs to be properly configured to provide details on what is going on in our MySQL instances. And setting up one of these monitoring solutions is neither quick nor trivial (well, maybe with the exception of Ganglia).

MySQL Workbench provides …

I recently had a case where replication lag on a slave was caused by a backup script. First reaction was to incriminate the additional pressure on the disks, but it turned out to be more subtle: Percona XtraBackup was not able to execute FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK due to a long-running query, and the server ended up being read-only. Let’s see how we can deal with that kind of situation.

In short

Starting with Percona XtraBackup 2.1.4, you can:

• Configure a timeout after which the backup will be aborted (and the global lock released) with the lock-wait-threshold, lock-wait-query-type and lock-wait-timeout options
• Or automatically kill all queries that prevent the lock to be granted with the kill-long-queries-timeout and kill-long-query-type settings

Full documentation is …

NOTE: This is part 1 of what will be a two-part series on the performance implications of using in-flight data encryption.

Some of you may recall my security webinar from back in mid-August; one of the follow-up questions that I was asked was about the performance impact of enabling SSL connections. My answer was 25%, based on some 2011 data that I had seen over on yaSSL’s website, but I included the caveat that it is workload-dependent, because the most expensive part of using SSL is establishing the connection. Not long thereafter, I received a request to conduct some more specific benchmarks surrounding SSL usage in MySQL, and today I’m going to show the results.

First, the testing …