May 19, 2014 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
I have previously written about the new replication protocol that comes with GTIDs in MySQL 5.6. Because of this new replication protocol, you can inadvertently create errant transactions that may turn any failover to a nightmare. Let’s see the problems and the potential solutions. In short Errant transactions may cause all kinds of data corruption/replication […]
May 09, 2014 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
One of the MySQL 5.6 features many people are interested in is Global Transactions IDs (GTIDs). This is for a good reason: Reconnecting a slave to a new master has always been a challenge while it is so trivial when GTIDs are enabled. However, using GTIDs is not only about replacing good old binlog file/position […]
Mar 06, 2014 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
I recently worked on an uncommon slow query: less than 100 rows were read and returned, the whole dataset was fitting in memory but the query took several seconds to run. Long story short: the query was a join involving 21 tables, running on MySQL 5.1. But by default MySQL 5.1 is not good at […]
Jan 28, 2014 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
Note: This blog has been updated for MySQL 5.7 here! In this blog, we’re going to discuss the top ten MySQL performance tuning settings that you can implement after an installation. When we are hired for a MySQL performance audit, we are expected to review the MySQL configuration and to suggest improvements. Many people are […]
Jan 03, 2014 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
A question often comes when talking about indexing: should we use multiple column indexes or multiple indexes on single columns? Peter Zaitsev wrote about it back in 2008 and the conclusion then was that a multiple column index is most often the best solution. But with all the recent optimizer improvements, is there anything different with […]
Dec 03, 2013 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
INFORMATION_SCHEMA is usually the place to go when you want to get facts about a system (how many tables do we have? what are the 10 largest tables? What is data size and index size for table t?, etc). However it is also quite common that such queries are very slow and create lots of […]
Oct 28, 2013 |
MySQL, Webinars
I want to thank all attendees of my webinar, “MySQL 5.6 New Replication Features: Benefits, Challenges and Limitations“. We had questions that I didn’t have the time to answer: Q: If I run on Amazon’s RDS, do I need to worry about enabling crash-safe slaves, or is that already in place? A: Crash-safe replication is […]
Oct 22, 2013 |
MongoDB, MySQL
We already discussed one to one relations in MongoDB, and the main conclusion was that you should design your collections according to the most frequent access pattern. With one to many relations, this is still valid, but other factors may come into play. Let’s look at a simple problem: we are a shop and we […]
Oct 21, 2013 |
MySQL, Webinars
On Wednesday I’ll be leading a webinar exploring MySQL 5.6’s new replication features. And yes, as usual I’ll deliver news on the good, the bad and the ugly (that is to say the benefits, limitations and challenges). The webinar, appropriately titled, “New Replication Features in MySQL 5.6: Benefits, Limitations, and Challenges“, is scheduled for Oct. […]
Oct 11, 2013 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL, Percona Software
I recently had a case where replication lag on a slave was caused by a backup script. First reaction was to incriminate the additional pressure on the disks, but it turned out to be more subtle: Percona XtraBackup was not able to execute FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK due to a long-running query, and the […]
Sep 13, 2013 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
Being able to configure slaves to be crash-safe is one of the major improvements of MySQL 5.6 with regards to replication. However we noticed confusion on how to enable this feature correctly, so let’s clarify how it should be done. In short 1. Stop MySQL on slave 2. Add relay_log_info_repository = TABLE and relay_log_recovery = […]
Aug 01, 2013 |
Insight for Developers, MongoDB, MySQL
For people used to relational databases and doing MySQL database design, using NoSQL solutions such as MongoDB brings interesting challenges. One of them is schema design: while in the relational world, normalization is a good way to start, how should we design our collections when creating a new MongoDB application? Let’s see with a simple […]
May 30, 2013 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
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. […]
May 21, 2013 |
MySQL
Global Transactions Identifiers are one of the new features regarding replication in MySQL 5.6. They open up a lot of opportunities to make the life of DBAs much easier when having to maintain servers under a specific replication topology. However you should keep in mind some limitations of the current implementation. This post is the […]
Apr 17, 2013 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
It’s not uncommon to promote a server from slave to master. One of the key things to protect your data integrity is to make sure that the promoted slave is permanently disconnected from its old master. If not, it may get writes from the old master, which can cause all kinds of data corruption. MySQL […]
Apr 05, 2013 |
MySQL, Percona Software, Webinars
I didn’t have time to answer all of the questions during Wednesday’s MySQL webinar, “5 Percona Toolkit Tools That Could Save Your Day,” but as promised, here are all of the questions and my answers. (A recording is available here.) Q: One of the links to download the Percona Toolkit for MySQL (percona.com/get/percona-toolkit.tgz) doesn’t work! A: […]
Mar 22, 2013 |
MySQL, Percona Events, Percona Software
On April 3 at 10 a.m. PST, I’ll be giving a webinar titled “5 Percona Toolkit Tools for MySQL That Could Save Your Day.” In this presentation you’ll learn how to perform typical but challenging MySQL database administration tasks. My focus will be on the following tools: pt-query-digest, to select the queries you should try […]
Feb 15, 2013 |
MySQL
MySQL 5.6 has an impressive list of improvements. Among them, replication checksums caught my attention as it seems that many people misunderstand the real added value of this new feature. I heard people think that with replication checksums, data integrity between the master and its replicas is now enforced. As we’ll see, it’s not that […]
Feb 11, 2013 |
MySQL
Some time ago, I had to convert all tables of a database from MyISAM to InnoDB on a new server. The plan was to take a logical dump on the master, exporting separately the schema and the data, then edit the CREATE TABLE statements to ensure all tables are created with InnoDB, and reload everything […]
Jan 21, 2013 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
Last time I wrote about a few tips that can make you more efficient when using the command line on Unix. Today I want to focus more on pager. The most common usage of pager is to set it to a Unix pager such as less. It can be very useful to view the result […]