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 …

Monitoring flow control in a Galera cluster is very important. If you do not, you will not understand why writes may sometimes be stalled. Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 provides 2 status variables for such monitoring: wsrep_flow_control_paused and wsrep_flow_control_paused_ns. Which one should you use?

What is flow control?

Flow control does not exist with regular MySQL replication, but only with Galera replication. It is simply the mechanism nodes are using when they are not able to keep up with the write load: to keep replication synchronous, the node that is starting to lag instructs the other nodes that writes should be paused for some time so it does not get too far behind.

If you are not familiar with this notion, you should read this …

MySQL Utilities are a set of tools provided by Oracle to perform many kinds of administrative tasks. When GTID-replication is enabled, 2 tools can be used for slave promotion: mysqlrpladmin and mysqlfailover. We will review mysqlrpladmin (version 1.4.3) in this post.

Summary

• mysqlrpladmin can perform manual failover/switchover when GTID-replication is enabled.
• You need to have your servers configured with --master-info-repository = TABLE or to add the --rpl-user option for the tool to work properly.
• The check for errant transactions is …

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 errors when failing over.
• Detection of errant transactions can be done with the GTID_SUBSET() and GTID_SUBTRACT() functions.
• If you find an errant transaction on one …

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 with unique identifiers, it is also using a new replication protocol. And if you are not aware of it, it can bite.

Replication protocols: old vs new

The old protocol is pretty straightforward: the slave connects to a given binary log file at a specific offset, and the master sends all the transactions from there.

The new protocol is slightly different: the slave first sends the range of GTIDs it has executed, and then the master sends every missing transaction. It also guarantees that a transaction with a given …

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 handling joins with such a large number of tables. The good news is that MySQL 5.6 brings welcome improvements.

Isolating the problem

As always with a slow query, finding the execution plan with EXPLAIN is the 1st step to understand where time is spent. Here the plan was very good with almost all joins using the primary key or a unique key, but perhaps the most interesting part was that EXPLAIN was very slow as well. This indicates that the optimizer takes a lot of time finding the optimal execution plan. To double check, we can run SHOW PROFILE:

mysql> set @@profiling = 1;
mysql> SELECT …

When we are hired for a MySQL performance audit, we are expected to review the MySQL configuration and to suggest improvements. Many people are surprised because in most cases, we only suggest to change a few settings even though hundreds of options are available. The goal of this post is to give you a list of some of the most critical settings.

We already made such suggestions in the past here on this blog a few years ago, but things have changed a lot in the MySQL world since then!

Before we start…

Even experienced people can make mistakes that can cause a lot of trouble. So before blindly applying the recommendations of this post, please keep in mind the following items:

• Change one setting at a time! This is the only way to estimate if a change is beneficial.
• Most …

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 I/O load. Here is a tip to avoid theses hassles: set innodb_stats_on_metadata to OFF.

This is a topic we already talked about, but given the number of systems suffering from INFORMATION_SCHEMA slowness, I think it is good to bring innodb_stats_on_metadata back on the table.

The problem

Let’s look at a system I’ve seen recently: MySQL 5.5, working set fitting in memory but not the whole dataset, around 4000 InnoDB tables.

The I/O load is very light as …

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 server ended up being read-only. Let’s see how we can deal with that kind of situation.

In short

Starting with Percona XtraBackup 2.1.4, you can:

• Configure a timeout after which the backup will be aborted (and the global lock released) with the lock-wait-threshold, lock-wait-query-type and lock-wait-timeout options
• Or automatically kill all queries that prevent the lock to be granted with the kill-long-queries-timeout and kill-long-query-type settings

Full documentation is …

For people used to relational databases, 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 example how we would create a data structure for MySQL (or any relational database) and for MongoDB. We will assume in this post that we want to store people information (their name) and the details from their passport (country and validity date).

Relational Design

In the relational world, the basic idea is to try to stick to the 3rd normal form and create two tables (I’ll omit indexes and foreign keys for clarity – MongoDB supports indexes but not foreign keys):

mysql> select * from people;
+----+------------+
| id | name       |
+----+------------+
|  1 | Stephane   |
|  2 | John       |
|  3 | …