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 …

I’ve previously noted my wish to have a comprehensive password policy in MySQL Server.  MySQL Server 5.7.4 takes a significant step towards this goal by adding native support for enforcing password lifetime policy.  This complements the validate_password plugin introduced in MySQL Server 5.6, which helps ensure adequate password complexity, and builds on the password expiration mechanism also introduced in MySQL Server 5.6.  This new feature has a new documentation page, and is covered in the MySQL Server 5.7.4 change logs, which …

Last Wednesday, I spoke at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup on the topic of changes coming in MySQL 5.7 (and later).  We actually went through two different slide decks; the first on features being considered for deprecation in MySQL 5.7 (or later), and the second set providing a brief overview of the new features and benefits already introduced in MySQL 5.7 via the development milestone releases (DMRs) published to date.  A big thanks to the entire SF Meetup group, and in particular the organizers (Erin, Mike and Darren), for having me.  The event was streamed and recorded, and you can view the full presentation on YouTube.  The slide deck can be found here.

The discussion around proposed deprecation was good, and this blog serves to document my own notes about what …

In my last post, a tale of two MySQL upgrades, a few folks asked if I would outline the process we used to upgrade, and what kind of downtime we had.

Well, the processes were different for each upgrade, so I will tackle them in separate blog posts. The first step was to upgrade all our MySQL 5.1 machines to MariaDB 5.5. As mentioned in the previous post, MariaDBs superior performance for subqueries is why we switched and we switched back to MySQL for 5.6 to take full advantage of the performance_schema.

It is not difficult to blog about our procedure, as we have documentation on each process. My first tip would be to do that in your own environment. This also enables other folks to help, even if they are sysadmins and not normally DBAs. You may notice the steps contain items that might be obvious to someone who has done maintenance before we try to …

Overview

First off, the important news. Tungsten Replicator 2.1.0 was released today.
You can download it and give it a try right now.

Second, I would say that I am quite surprised at how much we have done in this release. The previous release (2.0.7) was in February, which is just a few months ago, and yet it looks like ages when I see the list of improvements, new features and bug fixes in the Release Notes. I did not realized it until I ran my last batch of checks to test the upgrade from the previous release, which I hadn’t run for quite a long time. It’s …

Now that June has arrived it is time to plan what you will do over the summer months. In addition to your summer vacation plans, give thought to MySQL training for you and your team.

Summer is the time to brush up on those critical skills needed to ensure all systems are ready for the holiday shopping season.

In addition to our revised courses, that I talked about in a previous post, we are also running our new Moving to MySQL 5.6 class. This class covers new features in MySQL 5.6, migration planning, and application verification. This class was designed with the experienced MySQL DBA in mind–so it is a fast paced 2-day course.

Percona has a packed summer MySQL training …

You’ve just completed an upgrade from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6.  You followed the upgrade instructions in the manual, and ran mysql_upgrade.  But when you start MySQL 5.6, you still see the following error messages like the following in the server error log:

2013-03-26 16:45:51 5040 [ERROR] Column count of mysql.events_waits_current is w
rong. Expected 19, found 16. Created with MySQL 50520, now running 50610. Please
use mysql_upgrade to fix this error.
2013-03-26 16:45:51 5040 [ERROR] Column count of mysql.events_waits_history is w
rong. Expected 19, found 16. Created with MySQL 50520, now running 50610. Please
use mysql_upgrade to fix this error.

What went wrong?

Well, because mysql_upgrade is a client that’s built for a specific server version, it’s possible you have two …

The blog title says it all: Do we need a MySQL Cookbook? I tend to think so.

This seems to be something that is missing with current MySQL documentation. There is lots of information available but finding the appropriate bit can be quite tedious and it often requires looking in multiple places.

A lot of other software has such books, but for some reason MySQL seems to be missing one.

A recent example comes from a “documentation feature request” I posted today: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=68171. MySQL 5.6 provides a way to “move InnoDB tables” from one server to another. There are many reasons why you may want to do it, but the documentation is currently rather sparse. A simple “example recipe” for this would be good, as would an equivalent recipe for other engines where you can do this such as MyISAM. This is just an isolated …

Ubuntu does not provide an apt-get repository package for MySQL 5.5 on this older OS, however this is still a widely used long term support version. The following steps will upgrade an existing MySQL 5.1 apt-get version to a standard MySQL 5.5 binary.

Step 1. Remove existing MySQL 5.1 retaining data and configuration

sudo su -
service mysql stop
cp -r /etc/mysql /etc/mysql.51
cp -r /var/lib/mysql /var/lib/mysql.51
which mysqld
dpkg -P mysql-server mysql-server-5.1 mysql-server-core-5.1
which mysqld
which mysql
dpkg -P mysql-client-5.1 mysql-client-core-5.1
which mysql
dpkg -P libdbd-mysql-perl libmysqlclient16 mysql-common
# This will not remove /etc/mysql if any other files are in the directory
dpkg -l | grep mysql
[ -d /etc/mysql ] && mv /etc/mysql /etc/mysql.uninstall
cp -r /etc/mysql.51 /etc/mysql

2. Prepare configuration and required directories.

sudo su -
MYCNF="/etc/mysql/my.cnf"
grep basedir ${MYCNF}
sed -ie …

This walk through is based on the approach of code first and it assumes you have a basic understanding of code first Entity Framework, so please make sure to check this subject before going further with Entity Framework Code Based Migrations. The purpose of this post is to show you how you can upgrade your existing database and use the Code First Migrations to keep track of the changes done in your model and replicate them to your database.