I’ve had the opportunity to train lots of people on Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) over the last few years the product has existed.  This has taken the form of phone calls, emails, blog posts, webinars, and consulting engagements. This doesn’t count all the time I’ve spent grilling Codership on how things actually work.  But it has culminated in the PXC tutorial I have given annually at Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California for the last two years.  Baron even attended this year and had this say:

“Jay Janssen’s tutorial on Percona …

Overview

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 has been GA for several months now and people are thinking more and more about moving from 5.5 to 5.6. Most people don’t want to upgrade all at once, but would prefer a rolling upgrade to avoid downtime and ensure 5.6 is behaving in a stable fashion before putting all of production on it. The official guide to a rolling upgrade can be found in the PXC 5.6 manual. This blog post will attempt to summarize the basic process.

However, there are a few caveats to trying to do a rolling 5.6 upgrade from 5.5:

1. If you mix Galera 2 and Galera 3 nodes, you must set wsrep_provider_options=”socket.checksum=1″ on the Galera 3 nodes for backwards …

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 …

Most technologies achieving high-availability for MySQL need a load-balancer to spread the client connections to a valid database host, even the Tungsten special connector can be seen as a sophisticated load-balancer. People often use hardware load balancer or software solution like haproxy. In both cases, in order to avoid having a single point of failure, multiple load balancers must be used. Load balancers have two drawbacks: they increase network latency and/or they add a validation check load on the database servers. The increased network latency is obvious in the case of standalone load balancers where you must first connect to the load balancer which then completes the request by connecting to one of the database servers. Some workloads like reporting/adhoc queries are not affected by a small increase of latency but other workloads like oltp processing and real-time logging are. Each load balancers must also check regularly if the database …

The Percona Monitoring Plugins (PMP) provide some free tools to make it easier to monitor PXC/Galera nodes.  Monitoring broadly falls into two categories: alerting and historical graphing, and the plugins support Nagios and Cacti, respectively, for those purposes.

Graphing

An update to the PMP this summer (thanks to our Remote DBA team for supporting this!) added a Galera-specific host template that includes a variety of Galera-related stats, including:

• Replication …

With the last Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) release, two major features were added:

* a new command to bootstrap the cluster was added to the init script
* SST via Xtrabackup now supports Xtrabackup 2.1 features

In this post, I want to explain the benefits of these added features and how to use them.

If you follow the mysqlperformanceblog regularly, you’ve already noticed that there are several ways to start a node and that it’s not always easy to start the node that is supposed to bootstrap the entire cluster.

See :
- …

Async and PXC

A common question I get about Percona XtraDB Cluster is if you can mix it with asynchronous replication, and the answer is yes!  You can pick any node in your cluster and it can either be either a slave or a master just like any other regular MySQL standalone server (Just be sure to use log-slave-updates in both cases on the node in question!).  Consider this architecture:

However, there are some caveats to be aware of.  If you slave from a cluster node, there is no built in mechanism to fail that slave over automatically to another master node in your cluster.  You cannot assume that the binary log positions are the same on all nodes in your cluster (even if they start binary logging at the same time), so you can’t issue a CHANGE MASTER without knowing the proper binary log position to start at.

…

The aim of this post is to enumerate real-world usage of Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), and also to solicit use cases from the readers. One of the prominent usages in the production environment that we have come across (and our Percona consultants have assisted) is that of HP Cloud. There is a post about it here by Patrick Galbraith of HP. The post focuses on their deployment of PXC for HP Cloud DNS. The post focuses on the key aspects of synchronous replication setup with high-availability guarantees like split-brain immunity.

Nobody likes to debug async replication while its broken or …

Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these basics.

log_slave_updates is REQUIRED

You need to have log_slave_updates enabled on the cluster node acting as async slave for replicated events from the async master to be applied to the other nodes, that is if you have more than one PXC node. This is because before Galera can create writesets for the replicated events, binlog events must be generated for the transactions first. Under …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.30-23.7.4 for MySQL on April 17, 2013. Binaries are available from the downloads area or from our software repositories.

New Features:

• Percona XtraDB Cluster has implemented initial implementation of weighted quorum. Weight for node can be assigned via pc.weight option in the wsrep_provider_options variable. Accepted values are in the range [0, 255] (inclusive). Quorum is computed using weighted sum over group members.
• …