Percona Toolkit 2.1.8

Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 was released today and the new version comes with some pretty cool news: Beta support for MySQL 5.6 (which as you might know is also in beta).

In addition to various bug fixes, Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 also offers beta support for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC). Version 2.1.8 continues the trend of solid bug fix releases, and all 2.1 users are encouraged to upgrade.

You can download Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 here.  (More info on Percona Toolkit). Users who plan on running the tools on Percona XtraDB Cluster or MySQL 5.6 are advised to upgrade. …

pt-stalk recipes: Gather forensic data about MySQL when a server problem occurs

It happens to us all from time to time: a server issue arises that leaves you scratching your head. That’s when Percona Toolkit’s pt-stalk comes into play, helping you diagnose the problem by capturing diagnostic data that helps you pinpoint what’s causing the havoc hitting your database.

From the documentation (http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/pt-stalk.html):

pt-stalk watches for a trigger condition to become true, and then collects data to help in diagnosing problems. It is designed to run as a daemon with root privileges, so that you can diagnose intermittent problems that you cannot observe directly. You can also use it to execute a custom command, or to gather the data on demand without waiting for the trigger to happen. …

On December 19th at 1 PM Eastern / 10 AM Pacific, I will be giving a
webinar entitled “10 Percona Toolkit Tools Every MySQL DBA Should Know
About”.

As a Consultant, I make heavy use of Percona Toolkit tools while
solving customers’ problems, and I have used this experience to select
what I consider to be the top 10 tools everyone working with MySQL
should know about. I will present each of the selected tools using
examples based on real-world cases.

You can sign up by clicking the “Register” button here. Hope to see
you next week!

Yes it’s still 4 months away, but some pre-selected sessions for Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 have been released, and one is mine: Survey of Percona Toolkit: Command-line Tools for MySQL.  If you’ve not heard of Percona Toolkit, or have but have been putting off getting acquainted with it, attend my talk and I’ll get you off to a good start.  And if you didn’t know: I’m the lead PT developer, so I know the tools pretty well.

I really like the percona toolkit, we all love the percona toolkit.
I know how it’s difficult to write operational and efficient scripts (I try to do that myself everyday)
And it is even more difficult to share a script, to take the responsibility to share its own code.
From there, understand that this article is simply a review of my own thoughts about pt-archiver (with the invaluable assistance of @maximefouilleul), I don’t want to question the quality or usefulness of this tool.

I tried pt-archiver for the first time this week, and the first thing I do before using a tool is read the documentation (yes, I really like to read documentations)

I was intrigued by some options of this tool, first, I can read “It deletes data from the source by default“.
Personally, I hate that you want to remove my data by default, I prefer to have a –delete option …

Ah, the sometimes bitter pill of experience.

Recently I got "the call" about a server that was having problems. I began standard troubleshooting procedures but didn't see anything abnormal. After about 15 minutes of getting irritated I opened up the my.cnf and looked through it. Imagine my suprise when I saw the innodb_log_file_size parameter was set to 5M (five megabytes). Even though it was hard-coded in the my.cnf, this is actually the default size (at least through MySQL 5.1). A log file size of five megabytes is pitifully small and was proving to be a severe bottleneck for the system. The two log files were being , filled up and flushed more frequently than once a second.

Once the source of the trouble was discovered it was a simple matter of filing a RFC and resolving the issue. We increased the log file size to 2000 megabytes so flushing of the transaction logs occured when the server had the time/resources and not …

PT BOF at PLMCE 2012, or: I submitted a session for Percona Toolkit Birds of a Feather at Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2012. You should BoF too; hard deadline is Monday, March 12th: submit a BoF session, or submit a Lightning Talk.

This is a cross-post from the MySQL Performance Blog. I thought it would be interesting to users of PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, and $system-of-interest as well.

For about the past year I’ve been formulating a series of tools and practices that can provide deep insight into system performance simply by looking at TCP packet headers, and when they arrive and depart from a system. This works for MySQL as well as a lot of other types of systems, because it doesn’t require any of the contents of the packet. Thus, it works without knowledge of what the server and client are conversing about. Packet headers contain only information that’s usually regarded as non-sensitive (IP address, port, TCP flags, etc), so it’s also very easy to get access to this data even in highly secure environments.

I’ve …

Frédéric Descamps of Percona.

Percona Toolkit is Maatkit & Aspersa combined. Opensource and the tools are very useful for a DBA.

You need Perl, DBI, DBD::mysql, Term::ReadKey. Most tools are written in Perl, and whatever is in Bash is being re-written in Perl. There is also a tarball or RPM or DEB packages.

Know your environment. The hardware & OS are crucial for you to know. How much memory/CPU do you use? Do you use swap? Is this a physical/virtual machine? Do you have free space? What kind of RAID controller? Volumes? Disk? What about the network interfaces? What IO schedulers are used? Which filesystem is the data stored on? To answer all that, just use pt-summary.

Know your MySQL environment. Version? Build? How many databases? Where is the data …

First of all, I wish you a happy new year.
Many things happened last year, it was really exciting to be involved in the MySQL ecosystem.
I hope this enthusiasm will be increased this year, up to you !

To start the year, I propose the MySQL[plus] Awards 2011
It will only take 5 minutes to fill out these polls.
Answer with your heart first and then with your experience with some of these tools or services.

Polls will be closed January 31, so, vote now !
For “other” answers, please,  let me a comment with details.

Don’t hesitate to submit proposal for tools or services in the comments.
And, please, share these polls !

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, …