If you use Percona Server 5.5 and you have configured it to use multiple buffer pool instances than sooner or later you’ll see the following lines on the server’s error log and chances are you’ll be worried about them:

InnoDB: detected cycle in LRU for buffer pool 5, skipping to next buffer pool.
InnoDB: detected cycle in LRU for buffer pool 3, skipping to next buffer pool.
InnoDB: detected cycle in LRU for buffer pool 7, skipping to next buffer pool.

Worry not as this is mostly harmless. It’s becoming a February tradition for me (Fernando) to face a question about this subject (ok, it’s maybe a coincidence) and this time I’ve teamed up with my dear colleague and software engineer George Lorch to provide you the most complete blog post ever published on this topic … (with a belated thank you! to Ernie Souhrada, with whom I’ve also discussed this same …

MySQL introduced the Event Scheduler in version 5.1.6. The Event Scheduler is a MySQL-level “cron job”, which will run events inside MySQL. Up until now, this was not a very popular feature, however, it has gotten more popular since the adoption of Amazon RDS – as well as similar MySQL database as a service offerings where there is no OS level.

What is important to understand about the Event Scheduler is that it does not have any protection against multiple execution (neither does linux cron). Let’s imagine you have created an event that executes every 10 seconds, but the logic inside the event (i.e. queries or stored procedure call) can …

Global Transaction IDs (GTIDs) are one of my favorite features of MySQL 5.6. The main limitation is that you must stop all the servers at the same time to allow GTID-replication. Not everyone can afford to take a downtime so this requirement has been a showstopper for many people. Starting with Percona Server 5.6.22-72.0 enabling GTID replication can be done without almost no downtime. Let’s see how to do it.

Implementation of the Facebook patch

Finding a solution to migrate to GTIDs with no downtime is not a new idea, and several companies have already developed their own patch. The 2 best known implementations are the one from Facebook and the one from …

Being a QA Engineer, how would you feel if you had access to a framework which can generate 80+ crashes – a mix of hitting developer introduced assertions (situations that should not happen), and serious unforeseen binary crashes – for the world’s most popular open source database software – each and ever hour? What if you could do this running on a medium spec machine – even a laptop?

The seniors amongst you may object “But… generating a crash or assertion is one thing – creating a repeatable testcase for the same is quite another.”

Introducing pquery, mtr_to_sql, reducer.sh (the pquery-enabled version), and more:

80+ coredumps per hour. Fully automatic testcase creation. Near-100% testcase reproducibility. C++ core. 15 Seconds run time per trial. Up to 20-25k lines of SQL executed per trial. CLI testcases. Compatible with sporadic issues. High-end automation of many aspects.

It all …

MySQL 5.6 allows you to execute replicated events in parallel as long as data is split across several databases. This feature is named “Multi-Threaded Slave” (MTS) and it is easy to enable by setting slave_parallel_workers to a > 1 value. However if you decide to use MTS without GTIDs, you may run into annoying issues. Let’s look at two of them.

Skipping replication errors

When replication stops with an error, a frequent approach is to “ignore now and fix later.” This means you will run SET GLOBAL sql_slave_skip_counter=1 to be able to restart replication as quickly as possible and later use pt-table-checksum/pt-table-sync to resync data on the slave.

Then the day when I hit:

mysql> show slave status;
[...]
Last_SQL_Error: Worker 0 failed executing transaction '' at master log mysql-bin.000017, end_log_pos 1216451; Error 'Duplicate entry '1001' for key 'PRIMARY'' on query. …

Mydumper is known as the faster (much faster) mysqldump alternative. So, if you take a logical backup you will choose Mydumper instead of mysqldump. But what about the restore? Well, who needs to restore a logical backup? It takes ages! Even with Myloader. But this could change just a bit if we are able to take advantage of Fast Index Creation.

As you probably know, Mydumper and mysqldump export the struct of a table, with all the indexes and the constraints, and of course, the data. Then, Myloader and MySQL import the struct of the table and import the data. The most important difference is that you can configure Myloader to import the data using a certain amount of threads. The import steps are:

1. Create the complete struct of the table
2. Import the data

When you execute Myloader, internally it first creates the tables executing the “-schema.sql” files and then takes all the filenames …

As a MySQL DBA/consultant, it is part of my job to decode the MySQL binary logs – and there are a number of reasons for doing that. In this post, I’ll explain how you can get the important information about your write workload using MySQL row-based binary logs and a simple awk script.

First, it is important to understand that row-based binary logs contain the actual changes done by a query. For example, if I run a delete query against a table, the binary log will contain the rows that were deleted. MySQL provides the mysqlbinlog utility to decode the events stored in MySQL binary logs. You can read more about mysqlbinlog in detail in the reference manual here.

The following example illustrates how mysqlbinlog displays row events that specify data modifications. These correspond to events with the WRITE_ROWS_EVENT, UPDATE_ROWS_EVENT, …

The other day a customer asked me to do capacity planning for their web server farm. I was looking at the CPU graph for one of the web servers that had Hyper-threading switched ON and thought to myself: “This must be quite a misleading graph – it shows 30% CPU usage. It can’t really be that this server can handle 3 times more work?”

Or can it?

I decided to do what we usually do in such case – I decided to test it and find out the truth. Turns out – there’s more to it than meets the eye.

How Intel Hyper-Threading works

Before we get to my benchmark results, let’s talk a little bit about hyper-threading. According to Intel, Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology) uses processor resources more …

We have been using SHOW ENGINE INNODB MUTEX command for years. It shows us mutex and rw-lock information that could be useful during service troubleshooting in case of performance problems. As Morgan Tocker announced in his blog post the command will be removed from MySQL 5.7 and we have to use performance_schema to get that info.

The documentation of MySQL also says that most of the command output has been removed from 5.6 and that we can find similar info in performance_schema. It doesn’t show any examples of how to use performance_schema or what is the query we need to use from now on. It is also important to mention that 5.6 doesn’t show any warning about the feature being deprecated.

This is a short blog post to show how to configure performance_schema and get the info we need. Hoping it will end …

Sometimes it is desired to use particular software versions in production, and not necessary the latest ones. There may be several reasons for that, where I think the most common is when a new version should spend some time in testing or a staging environment before getting to production. In theory each new version is supposed to be better as usually it contains a handful of bug fixes and even new or improved functionality. However there is also a risk of some regression or a new bug introduction as a side effect of code changes.

Quite often DBAs want the same MySQL version to be installed on all database instances, regardless of what actually is the latest version available in the software provider’s repository. There are several ways to achieve this:
* download specific version packages manually and then install them,
* have custom local repository mirror where you decide when and which version gets there, and just update …