Here at the MySQL Performance Blog, we’ve been discussing the several new features that MySQL 5.6 brought: GTID-based replication, InnoDB Fulltext, Memcached integration, a more complete performance schema, online DDL and …

The main benefit of using GTIDs is to have much easier failover than with file-based replication. We will see how to change the replication topology when using GTID-based replication. That will show where GTIDs shine and where improvements are expected.

This is the second post of a series of articles focused on MySQL 5.6 GTIDs. You can find part one here.

Our goal will be to go from setup #1 to setup #2 on the picture below, following various scenarios:

For these tests, all servers are running on 127.0.0.1 with ports ranging from 10000 for s0 to 10004 for s4.

Scenario #1: All slaves have processed all the writes

This is the easiest case, we will …

Selecting the most appropriate solution for a MySQL HA infrastructure is as much a business and philosophical decision as it is a technical one, but often the choice is made without adequately considering all three perspectives.  When too much attention is paid to one of these aspects at the cost of the others, the resulting system may be over-engineered, poorly-performing, and/or various other flavors of suboptimal.

On Wednesday, June 5, at 10 a.m. PDT (1700 UTC), I will be presenting a webinar entitled, Choosing a MySQL HA Solution, in which we’ll explore the topic of MySQL HA from each of these perspectives.  The goal will be to motivate your thinking about HA in a holistic fashion and help …

I am currently working with a large customer and I am involved with servers located in two data centers, one with Solaris servers and the other one with Linux servers. The Solaris side is cleverly setup using zones and ZFS and this provides a very low virtualization overhead. I learned quite a lot about these technologies while looking at this, thanks to Corey Mosher.

On the Linux side, we recently deployed a pair on servers for backup purpose, boxes with 64 300GB SAS drives, 3 raid controllers and 192GB of RAM. These servers will run a few slave instances each of production database servers and will perform the backups.  The write load is not excessive so a single server can easily handle the write load of all the MySQL instances.  The original idea was to configure them with raid-10 + LVM, making sure to …

I recently had to do some customer work involving the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin and would like to share my experience in this post.

Auditing user activity in MySQL  has traditionally been challenging. Most data can be obtained from the slow or general log, but this involves a lot of data you don’t need too, and isn’t flexible at all. The specific problem of logging failed connection attempts has been discussed on a previous post in our blog.

Starting with 5.1, the new plugin API gives us more flexibility by allowing users to extend the server’s functionality with their own code, and this is what the McAffee plugin does.

Installation and …

Percona XtraBackup 2.0.7 has been published with support for GTID based replication. As promised, here is the step-by-step guide on how to create a new GTID based slave (or repair a broken one) using XtraBackup. The process is pretty straightforward.

1- Take a backup from any server on the replication environment, master or slave:

# innobackupex /destination/

In the destination folder there will be a file with the name xtrabackup_binlog_info:

# cat xtrabackup_binlog_info
mysql-bin.000002        1232            c777888a-b6df-11e2-a604-080027635ef5:1-4

Now it contains both, binary log coordinates and GTID information.

…

Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these basics.

log_slave_updates is REQUIRED

You need to have log_slave_updates enabled on the cluster node acting as async slave for replicated events from the async master to be applied to the other nodes, that is if you have more than one PXC node. This is because before Galera can create writesets for the replicated events, binlog events must be generated for the transactions first. Under …

To recover a dropped or corrupt table with Percona Data Recovery Tool for InnoDB you need two things: media with records(ibdata1, *.ibd, disk image, etc.) and a table structure. Indeed, there is no information about the table structure in an InnoDB page. Normally we either recover the structure from .frm files or take it from some old backup.

A new tool sys_parser can recover the table structure from InnoDB dictionary.

Why do we need a new tool anyway? It is absolutely critical to have an accurate table definition to ensure a successful recovery. Even an unnoticeable difference like NULL or NOT NULL can shift all values by a byte and thus will spoil the result. That’s why I prefer the structure from .frm …

Swapping has always been something bad for MySQL performance but it is even more important for HA systems. It is so important to avoid swapping with HA that NDB cluster basically forbids calling malloc after the startup phase and hence its rather complex configuration.

Probably most readers of this blog know (or should know) about Linux swappiness setting, which basically controls how important is the file cache for Linux. Basically, with InnoDB, since the file cache is not important we add “vm.swappiness = 0″ to “/etc/sysctl.conf” and run “sysctl -p” and we are done.

Swappiness solves part of the swapping issue but not all. With Numa systems, the picture is more complex and swapping can occur because of a memory imbalance between the physical cpus, the sockets and not cores. Jeremy Cole explained this here and …

This blog post is part two of two. Like part one, published Wednesday, this is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog. Thanks again to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon. And one more reminder that I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo next week in Santa Clara, California so look for me there. You can checkout the sessions I’ll be leading here.

In my last post, I described a solution for keeping the caches of a MySQL standby server hot using MySQL slow logs with …