One of the common causes of downtime with MySQL is running out of connections. Have you ever seen this error? “ERROR 1040 (00000): Too many connections.” If you’re working with MySQL long enough you surely have. This is quite a nasty error as it might cause complete downtime… transient errors with successful transactions mixed with failing ones as well as only some processes stopping to run properly causing various kinds of effects if not monitored properly.

There are number of causes for running out of connections, the most common ones involving when the Web/App server is creating unexpectedly large numbers of connections due to a miss-configuration or some script/application leaking connections or creating too many connections in error.

The solution I see some people employ is just to increase max_connections to some very high number so MySQL “never” runs out of connections. This however can cause …

I’m happy to announce that the recording for my recent webinar “5 Proactive Measures to Minimize MySQL Downtime” is now available, along with the slides. They can both be found here.

My webinar focused on the top 5 operational measures that prevent or reduce downtime — along with the related business impact in a significant number of customer emergency scenarios.

As a senior consultant on Percona’s 24×7 Emergency Consulting team, I’ve helped resolve a …

Failure is an unavoidable part of IT life, but it does not always have to imply MySQL service downtime. In the years I have been working at Percona, I have been involved in many customer emergency cases, and I have seen a good number of problems that could have been avoided or alleviated if relatively simple proactive measures were taken.

On July 17th 2013, at 10 a.m. PDT, I will be delivering a webinar focused on presenting the Top 5 such measures, with the objective of helping you assess your current situation, and implement any needed changes to avoid production downtime in the future. The webinar is titled: “5 Proactive Measures to Minimize MySQL Downtime.”

Later that day, I will be delivering the …