Tools for MySQL are a vital part of any deployment, so it’s important to use ones that are reliable and well-designed. Percona Toolkit is a collection of more than 30 command-line tools for MySQL, Percona Server, and MariaDB that can help database administrators automate a variety of database and system tasks. With so many available tools, however, it can be difficult knowing where to start.

For this reason I invite you to join me on Wednesday, May 7 at 10 a.m. Pacific time for a free webinar titled, “The top 9 Percona Toolkit tools that can make your job easier.” You can register directly …

Recently there was a discussion on the webscalesql mailing list started by Chip Turner on a proposed change to the MAX_STATEMENT_TIME patch. This feature has been known as per query variable settings (WL#681) and even shipping in Percona Server 5.6 as per-query variable statement.

This feature has piqued my interest since 2009, when the MySQL project (then owned by Sun Microsystems) participated in Google Summer of Code 2009, and we got code from …

Following my previous post on the launch, I just rolled Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on an Amazon EC2 t1.micro instance (not something you expect to run a database server on, for sure – 1 vCPU, 0.613GiB RAM). If you do an apt-cache search mysql you get 435 return result sets with the default configuration (trusty: main & universe).

If you do apt-get install mysql-server, you get MySQL 5.5. You enter the password of choice, and before you know it, MySQL is installed (a SELECT VERSION() will return 5.5.35-1ubuntu1).

Next you decide to install MariaDB. I run an apt-get install mariadb-server. It pulls in libjemalloc (for TokuDB) and I expect future releases to ship this engine by default. You enter the password, and you get a new message (as pictured).

…

Inspired by Yngve Svendsen’s post, I too think it makes absolute sense to congratulate Ubuntu on the 14.04 LTS release (some server notes - MySQL has a section dedicated to it). Ubuntu users have a lot of server choice today (that’s from all major MySQL ecosystem vendors):

• MySQL 5.5.35 ships in main. It is the default MySQL. Oracle has committed to providing updates to 5.5 throughout the LTS release cycle of Ubuntu (which is longer than the planned EOL for 5.5). This is why the grant of a Micro Release …

I’d like to congratulate Canonical with the new Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) Release, it really looks like a great release, and I say it having my own agenda It looks even more great because it comes with a full line of Percona Software.
If you install Ubuntu 14.04 and run aptitude search you will find:

• Percona Toolkit
• Percona XtraBackup
• Percona XtraDB Cluster
• Percona Server (as part of Percona XtraDB Cluster installation)

Percona Toolkit and …

With the recent Heartbleed bug, people are clearly more interested in their MariaDB/MySQL running with SSL and if they have problems. First up, you should read the advisory notes: MariaDB, Percona Server (blog), and MySQL (blog).

Next, when you install MariaDB (or a variant) you are usually dynamically linked to the OpenSSL library that the …

If you are a MySQL power user in Korea, its well worth joining the Korean MySQL Power User Group. This is a group led by senior DBAs at many Korean companies. From what I gather, there is experience there using MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server and Galera Cluster (many on various 5.5, some on 5.6, and quite a few testing 10.0). No one is using WebScaleSQL (yet?). The discussion group is rather active, and I’ve got a profile there (I get questions translated for me).

This is just a natural evolution of the DBA Dinners that were held once every quarter. Organised by OSS Korea, and sometimes funded by SkySQL, people would eat & drink, while …

If you’ve been following this blog (my colleague, David Busby, posted about it yesterday) or any tech news outlet in the past few days, you’ve probably seen some mention of the “Heartbleed” vulnerability in certain versions of the OpenSSL library.

So what is ‘Heartbleed’, really?

In short, Heartbleed is an information-leak issue. An attacker can exploit this bug to retrieve the contents of a server’s memory without any need for local access. According to the researchers that discovered it, this can be done without leaving any trace of compromise on the system. In other words, if you’re vulnerable, they can steal your keys and you won’t even notice that they’ve gone missing. I use the word “keys” literally here; by being able to access the contents of the impacted service’s memory, the attacker is …

Percona Server 5.6.11-60.3 introduces a new “log archiving” feature. Percona XtraBackup 2.1.5 supports “apply archived logs.” What does it mean and how it can be used?

Percona products propose three kinds of incremental backups. The first is full scan of data files and comparison the data with backup data to find some delta. This approach provides a history of changes and saves disk space by storing only data deltas. But the disadvantage is a full-data file scan that adds load to the disk subsystem. The second kind of incremental backup avoids extra disk load during data file scans.

The idea is in reading only changed data pages. The information about what specific pages were changed is provided by the server itself which …

Two weeks ago we released an Alpha release of Percona Server with TokuDB. Right now I am on a final stage of evaluation of TokuDB for using in our project Percona Cloud Tools and it looks promising.

What is the most attractive in TokuDB? For me it is compression, but not just compression: TokuDB provides great performance over compressed data.

In my synthetic tests I saw a compression ratio of 10:1 (TokuDB LZMA to InnoDB uncompressed), in the real production data it is less, 6:1, but still impressive.

In our servers we have 4 x SSD Crucial M500 960GB combined in RAID5, which give 2877.0 GB of usable space. With TokuDB we should be able to pack around 15TB of raw data. Of course we can try InnoDB compression, …