Given the recent excitement & interest around OpenStack I wanted to make sure I was ready to conduct appropriate evaluations of system performance.  I generally turn to sysbench since it comes with a variety of different tests (accessed via –test= option interface), including:

• fileio – File I/O test
• cpu – CPU performance test
• memory – Memory functions speed test
• threads – Threads subsystem performance test
• mutex – Mutex performance test

As you can see, sysbench lets you stress many of the fundamental components of your hardware and infrastructure, such as your disk subsystem, along with your CPUs and memory. An additional option exists that is designed to perform synthetic stress testing of MySQL, and I was surprised when I didn’t see it in the above list on version 0.5, as it used to show up as “oltp – OLTP test”. What happened to …

Reconfiguring replication has always been a challenge with MySQL. Each time the replication topology has to be changed, the process is tedious and error-prone because finding the correct binlog position is not straightforward at all. Global Transaction IDs (GTIDs) introduced in MySQL 5.6 aim at solving this annoying issue.

The idea is quite simple: each transaction is associated with a unique identifier shared by all servers in a given replication topology. Now reconfiguring replication is easy as the correct binlog position can be automatically calculated by the server.

Awesome? Yes it is! However GTIDs are also changing a lot of things in how we can perform operations on replication. For instance, skipping transactions is a bit more difficult. Or you can get bitten by …

Reconfiguring replication has always been a challenge with MySQL. Each time the replication topology has to be changed, the process is tedious and error-prone because finding the correct binlog position is not straightforward at all. Global Transaction IDs (GTIDs) introduced in MySQL 5.6 aim at solving this annoying issue.

The idea is quite simple: each transaction is associated with a unique identifier shared by all servers in a given replication topology. Now reconfiguring replication is easy as the correct binlog position can be automatically calculated by the server.

Awesome? Yes it is! However GTIDs are also changing a lot of things in how we can perform operations on replication. For instance, skipping transactions is a bit more difficult. Or you can get bitten by …

ScaleArc hired Percona to benchmark failover times for the ScaleArc database traffic management software in different scenarios. We tested failover times for various clustered setups, where ScaleArc itself was the load balancer for the cluster. These tests complement other performance tests on the ScaleArc software – sysbench testing for latency and testing for WordPress acceleration.

We tested failover times for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and MHA (any traditional MySQL replication-based solution works pretty much the same way).

In each case, we tested failover with a rate limited …

MySQL plays a critical role in OpenStack. It serves as the host database supporting most components such as Nova, Glance, and Keystone and is the most mature guest database in Trove. Many OpenStack operators use Percona open source software including the MySQL drop-in compatible Percona Server and Galera-based Percona XtraDB Cluster as well as tools such as Percona XtraBackup and Percona Toolkit. We see a need in the community to understand how to improve MySQL performance …

Hi, I recently had the experience of assisting with a migration of a customer MySQL installation to Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service). Amazon RDS is a great platform for hosting your MySQL installation and offers the following list of pros and cons:

• You can scale your CPU, IOPS, and storage space separately by using Amazon RDS. Otherwise you need to take downtime and upgrade physical components of a rack-mounted server.
• Backups, software version patching, failure detection, and (some) recovery is automated with Amazon RDS.
• You lose shell access to your DB instance
• You lose SUPER privilege for regular users. Many SUPER-type statements and commands are provided for as a Stored Procedure.
• It is easy to set up multiple read replicas (slaves in READ_ONLY=1 mode).
• You can set up a secondary sychronous …

We’ve recently received a number of questions on how to implement incremental MySQL backups alongside encryption with Percona XtraBackup. Some users thought it was not initially possible because with the default

--encrypt

options with XtraBackup, all files will be encrypted, but alas, that is not the case. This is where the option

--extra-lsn-dir

becomes useful, because it allows you to save LSN (Log Sequence Number) information to another directory and exclude it from encryption, allowing you to use the same information needed by incremental backups. Enough talk, let me show you.

Because you would want to usually script your backup and restore procedure, I’d use variables here as well to make you more familiar. First, I’d create 3 folders, where my backups will be stored, ‘full’ for full backups, ‘incr’ for …

ScaleArc recently hired Percona to perform various tests on its database traffic management product. This post is the outcome of the benchmarks carried out by Uday Sawant (ScaleArc) and myself. You can also download the report directly as a PDF here.

The goal of these benchmarks is to identify the potential overhead of the ScaleArc software itself and the potential benefits of caching. The benchmarks were carried out with the trunk version of sysbench. For this reason, we used a very small set of data, so the measurements will be fast, and it’s known that caching has huge benefits when the queries themselves are rather expensive. We decided that we would rather show that benefit with a real-world application, which is coming later is this series. And if you’re in the Silicon Valley area, be sure to join us this evening at the …

ClusterControl for Percona XtraDB Cluster is now available in three different versions thanks to our partnership with Severalnines. ClusterControl will make it simpler to manage and monitor Percona XtraDB Cluster, MySQL Cluster, MySQL Replication, or MySQL Galera.

I am very excited about our GA release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 last week. As Vadim described in his blog post announcing the release, we have brought together the benefits of Percona Server 5.6, Percona XtraBackup and Galera 3 to create a drop-in compatible, open source, state-of-the-art high availability MySQL clustering solution. We could not have done it without the close cooperation and help of our partners at Codership. To learn more, join us on February …

We are nearing the one-year anniversary since MySQL 5.6 went GA – which is typically a good time even for the most conservative users to start thinking about upgrading. At this point there is a fair amount of practical use and experience; many bugs have also been fixed (1991 to be exact according to Morgan Tocker).

We also know that MySQL 5.6 has been used in some very demanding environments on a very large scale, such as at Facebook. We also know from the Facebook team, after kindly sharing their upgrade experiences, that it takes a lot of work to upgrade to MySQL 5.6. That’s where Percona can help!

In my webinar this Wednesday, “ …