Monitoring MySQL and effectively managing it can be challenging. Identifying issues before they grow into performance problems that impact end users can be crucial. Knowing which tools to use, which key metrics to monitor, and how to resolve issues can be enormously important. When considering these facts, we at Percona decided to take steps to provide our Support customers with the tools, alerts, and advice they need to have higher performing, more secure, and easier to manage MySQL deployments.

Percona Support Now Includes MONyog and Percona Advisors

I am pleased to announce that Percona now provides our Gold and Platinum Percona Support for MySQL customers with the enterprise grade tools and advice they need for better performance, fewer database issues, and effective monitoring of MySQL. We have partnered with Webyog to provide our customers with MONyog …

TL;DR version: The backup locks feature introduced in Percona Server 5.6.16-64.0 is a lightweight alternative to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK and can be used to take both physical and logical backups with less downtime on busy servers. To employ the feature with mysqldump, use mysqldump --lock-for-backup --single-transaction. The next release of Percona XtraBackup will also be using backup locks automatically if the target server supports the feature.

Now on to the gory details, but let’s start with some history.

In the beginning…

In the beginning there was FLUSH TABLES, and users messed with their MyISAM tables under a live server and were not ashamed. Users could do nice things like:

mysql> FLUSH TABLES;
# execute myisamchk, myisampack, backup / restore some tables, etc.

And users were happy until someone realized that tables must be …

Percona Server version 5.6.16-64.0

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.6.16-64.0 on March 10th, 2014 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories.

Based on MySQL 5.6.16, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.6.16-64.0 is the current GA release in the Percona Server 5.6 series. All of Percona’s …

Percona Server version 5.5.36-34.0

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.36-34.0 on March 10th, 2014 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.36, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.36-34.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the …

I spoke last month at linux.conf.au 2014 in Perth, Australia, and one of my sessions focused on the “Continuous Integration (CI) testing of Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC)” at the Developer,Testing, Release and CI miniconf.

Here is the video of the presentation:

Here is the presentation itself:

Percona XtraDB Cluster before every release: Glimpse into CI testing from Raghavendra PrabhuBelow is a rough transcript of the talk:

This talk covered the continuous integration testing of the Galera cluster; specifically, Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), based on Galera, is taken into …

We recently announced Percona ClusterControl supplied in partnership with Severalnines. This enterprise-grade cluster management and monitoring software is available with a Percona Support contract covering Percona XtraDB Cluster, MySQL Cluster, or MySQL Galera. In this blog post I am going to show you how to use Percona ClusterControl to to create a new 3-node cluster with Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Percona ClusterControl architecture

The software has three main parts:

• Percona ClusterControl UI: This is the web interface from where we can create new clusters and monitor and manage …

One of the more popular support requests we get involves setting up the official Percona rsync repositories that can be used to set up local mirrors. I’m glad to announce that this was implemented recently. You can now access the rsync repository at:

rsync://rsync.percona.com/rsync/

Setting up the local mirror can be useful if you have a larger number of systems and you don’t want to download packages from the remote repository multiple times, it can also be useful if the original repository is slower or inaccessible.

Setting up the local repository

Create a folder on disk where the files will be downloaded. Make sure you have enough space for this, currently repository for CentOS 6 is almost 2GB.

[root@percona1]# mkdir -p /data/repo/percona/

After this use createrepo to create all the necessary repository …

Percona is pleased to announce the first General Availability release of the leading open source High Availability solution for MySQL, Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 on January 30, 2014. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6
Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 is an active/active cluster solution for High Availability (HA) MySQL that delivers performance and MySQL-based cluster management features available nowhere else. This free, open source solution combines …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.7 on January 24th, 2014. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories.

This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.1 series. Percona XtraBackup is an open source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking backups for InnoDB and XtraDB databases. Percona XtraBackup is an open source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking …

This blog, MySQLPerformanceBlog.com, is powered by WordPress, but we never really looked into what kind of queries to MySQL are used by WordPress. So for couple months we ran a Query Analytics (part of Percona Cloud Tools) agent there, and now it is interesting to take a look on queries. Query Analytics uses reports produced by pt-query-digest, but it is quite different as it allows to see trends and dynamics of particular query, in contrast to pt-query-digest, which is just one static report.

Why looking into queries important? I gave an intro in my previous post from this series.

So Query Analytics give the report on the top queries. How to detect which query is “bad”?
One of metrics I am typically looking into is ratio of “Rows …