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Przemysław MalkowskiI was once helping one of our customers on how to load MySQL audit logs into a MySQL database and analyze them. But immediately I thought: “Hey, this is not the most efficient solution! MySQL or typical RDBMS, in general, were not really meant to store logs after all.” So, I decided to explore an […]
Recently I was dealing with an unexpected issue raised by our Support customer, in which data became inconsistent after a schema change was applied. After some investigation, it turned out that affected tables had a special word in the comments of some columns, which triggered an already known (and fixed) issue with the TableParser.pm library […]
Last year, I made the first post in a small series, which aimed to highlight unique features of Percona Server for MySQL, by discussing binlog_space_limit option. Today, I am going to discuss another important type of log available in MySQL that is enhanced in Percona Server for MySQL – the slow query log. The reason […]
I think it is often confusing to compare upstream MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL, and some helpful information can be found in the introductory notes. But what does that really mean for an ordinary DBA, especially if none of the known big extra features are important in a particular use case? In this article, […]
If you are using Galera replication, you know that schema changes may be a serious problem. With its current implementation, there is no way even a simple ALTER will be unobtrusive for live production traffic. It is a fact that with the default TOI alter method, Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) cluster suspends writes in order […]
In this blog, we’ll look at how to quickly add a node to an InnoDB Cluster or Group Replication using Percona XtraBackup. Adding nodes to a Group Replication cluster can be easy (documented here), but it only works if the existing nodes have retained all the binary logs since the creation of the cluster. Obviously, […]
Probably not well known but quite an important optimization was introduced in MySQL 5.6 – reduced overhead for “read only transactions”. While usually by a “transaction” we mean a query or a group of queries that change data, with transaction engines like InnoDB, every data read or write operation is a transaction. Now, as a […]
RocksDB engine—and it’s MySQL implementation MyRocks—is a very good alternative engine for MySQL. It has proven to be very efficient and stable for many workloads, including those of large scale. However, it is still a relative newborn in the MySQL ecosystem, and has only a small fraction of the adoption rate of InnoDB. That means […]
In this blog post, we’ll look at how to approach pt-table-checksum errors. pt-table-checksum is one of the most popular tools in Percona Toolkit, and it is widely used to identify data differences between masters and slaves. Therefore, as Percona Support Engineers we have customers often asking questions related to the pt-table-checksum errors and warnings produced. […]
UPDATE: Some of the language in the original post was considered overly-critical of Oracle by some community members. This was not my intent, and I’ve modified the language to be less so. I’ve also changed the term “synchronous” (which the use of is inaccurate and misleading) to “virtually synchronous.” This term is more accurate and […]
In this blog, we’ll discuss how to use concurrency to help with WAN latency when using synchronous clusters. WAN Latency Problem Our customers often ask us for help or advice with WAN clustering problems. Historically, the usual solution for MySQL WAN deployments is having the primary site in one data center, and stand-by backup site in […]
This blog discusses how to prepare your database for the new leap second coming in the new year. At the end of this year, on December 31, 2016, a new leap second gets added. Many of us remember the huge problems this caused back in 2012. Some of our customers asked how they should prepare for this year’s event […]
In this blog post we’ll discuss pt-online-schema-change, and how to correctly use it. Always use pt-osc? Altering large tables can be still a problematic DBA task, even now after we’ve improved Online DDL features in MySQL 5.6 and 5.7. Some ALTER types are still not online, or sometimes just too expensive to execute on busy production […]
High Availability Have you ever wondered if your application should be able to work in read-only mode? How important is that question? MySQL seems to be the most popular database solution for web-based products. Most typical Internet application workloads consist of many reads, with usually few writes. There are exceptions of course – MMO games […]
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 […]
Recently I encountered a specific situation in which a customer was forced to stay with the MyISAM engine due to a legacy application using tables with over 1000 columns. Unfortunately InnoDB has a limit at this point. I did not expect to hear this argument for MyISAM. It is usually about full text search or […]
Galera replication for MySQL brings not only the new, great features to our ecosystem, but also introduces completely new maintenance techniques. Are you concerned about adding such new complexity to your MySQL environment? Perhaps that concern is unnecessarily. I am going to present here some simple tips that hopefully will let fresh Galera users prevent […]
In my previous post I pointed out that the existing ARCHIVE storage engine in MySQL may not be the one that will satisfy your needs when it comes to effectively storing large and/or old data. But are there any good alternatives? As the primary purpose of this engine is to store rarely accessed data in disk […]
Sometimes there is a need for keeping large amounts of old, rarely used data without investing too much on expensive storage. Very often such data doesn’t need to be updated anymore, or the intent is to leave it untouched. I sometimes wonder what I should really suggest to our Support customers. For this purpose, the […]