We just released our first alpha of Percona XtraBackup 2.1 for MySQL and with it we included the ability to encrypt backups on the fly (full documentation here). This feature is different than simply piping the backup stream through the openssl or gpg binaries, which is what some people have used in the past. A big benefit of using the built-in encryption is that multiple CPU cores can be used for encryption (with the --encrypt-threads option). You can also combine compression and encryption, each using multiple CPU cores.

One advantage of …

5.6 has redefined MySQL performance and usability. Some great talks at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo will provide insight into the new features and benefits of this major release. The conference is April 22-25, 2013 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and Hyatt Santa Clara.

Monday evening features the conference Welcome Reception where attendees can relax over food and beverages in the exhibition area following the day’s tutorials. After the Welcome Reception, at 6:30 pm, Oracle is hosting a reception to celebrate MySQL 5.6 going GA which is open to the public (but space is limited and pre-registration is required).

The MySQL 5.6 content continues Tuesday morning when …

Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev leads a track at Percona MySQL University in Raleigh, N.C. on Jan. 29, 2013.

Percona MySQL University, Toronto is taking place this Friday and I’m very excited about this event because it is a special opportunity to fit a phenomenal number of specific and focused MySQL technical talks all into one day, for free.

Over the course of the day we will cover some of the hottest topics in the MySQL space. There will be talks covering topics like MySQL 5.6, MySQL in the Cloud and High Availability for MySQL, as well as Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL. We have talks planned for nearly every …

Facebook is a major user of MySQL and has pushed the performance limits of the technology. Their MySQL experts have deep, hands on knowledge of the technology. I’m pleased to welcome Mark Callaghan, Software Engineer for Database Infrastructure at Facebook, back again this year to the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo to share his expertise. Mark was a keynote speaker at last year’s conference and will appear this year with a group of Facebook MySQL experts:

• Domas Mituzas, …

As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic event occurs.

With our Remote DBA service we can take care of backups for you, what follows are some of the internals of our implementation.

What kind of outages can happen?

• Someone runs UPDATE or DELETE and forgets the where clause or filters weren’t quite right
• The application had a bug causing data to be removed or overwritten
• A table (or entire schema) was dropped …

I’m pleased to announce that Oracle is sending some of their top technical people to speak at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. The conference takes place April 22-25, 2013 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and Hyatt Santa Clara.

Tomas Ulin, VP, MySQL Engineering for Oracle, will present an invited keynote talk on “Driving MySQL Innovation” during the Tuesday morning opening keynotes. With the recent release of MySQL 5.6, conference attendees will hear about the latest developments of this major MySQL release.

In addition to Tomas, Oracle MySQL technologists will also lead three breakout …

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6: Part 2, The Queries!

This is part 2 in a 3 part series. In part 1, we took a quick look at some initial configuration of InnoDB full-text search and discovered a little bit of quirky behavior; here, we are going to run some queries and compare the result sets. Our hope is that the one of two things will happen; either the results returned from a MyISAM FTS query will be exactly identical to the same query when performed against InnoDB data, OR that the results returned by InnoDB FTS will somehow be “better” (as much as it’s actually possible to do this in a single blog post) than what MyISAM gives us.

Recall that we have two different sets of …

Investigating MySQL Replication Latency in Percona XtraDB Cluster

I was curious to check how Percona XtraDB Cluster behaves when it comes to MySQL replication latency — or better yet, call it data propagation latency. It was interesting to see whenever I can get stale data reads from other cluster nodes after write performed to some specific node. To test it I wrote quite a simple script (you can find it in the end of the post) which connects to one node in the cluster, performs an update and then immediately does the read from second node. If the data has been already propagated — good, if not we’ll continue to retry reads until it finally propagates, and then measure the latency. This is used to see whenever application …

MySQL 5.5 lock_wait_timeout: patience is a virtue, and a locked server

Like Ovais said in Implications of Metadata Locking Changes in MySQL 5.5, the hot topic these days is MySQL 5.6, but there was an important metadata locking change in MySQL 5.5.  As I began to dig into the Percona Toolkit bug he reported concerning this change apropos pt-online-schema-change, I discovered something about lock_wait_timeout …

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many customers for whom the prudent move would be a migration to InnoDB, but due to their use of MyISAM FTS, the idea of a complete or partial migration was, for one reason or another, an impractical solution. So, when FTS for InnoDB was first announced, I thought this might end up being the magic bullet that would help these sorts of customers realize all of the benefits that have been engineered into InnoDB over the past few years and still keep their FTS capability without having to make any significant code changes.

Unfortunately, I think that hope may be premature. While it is true that InnoDB FTS in MySQL 5.6 is …