This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and it could serve as a reference architecture.

You will need 4 virtual machines. 3 for PXC and 1 for the client, which will have HaProxy. I used CentOS 6 as the operating system, the instructions are similar for any Linux distribution.

The client node will have HaProxy installed and it will redirect requests to PXC nodes. This approach works well in real-world scenarios too. Running HaProxy on the application servers instead of having them as dedicated entities gives you benefits like you don’t need an extra network roundtrip because of a loadbalancer and scalability of PXC’s load balancing layer scales …

I have a customer who is considering Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a two colo WAN environment.  They wanted me to do a test comparing PXC against semi-synchronous replication to see how they stack up against each other.

Test Environment

The test environment included AWS EC2 nodes in US-East and US-West (Oregon).  The ping RTT latency between these nodes was right around 100ms.

All environments used Percona Server or Percona XtraDB Cluster server 5.5.24.  Innodb durability was disabled for all tests (innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2).  All other settings were the same kept the same unless otherwise noted.

I tested against the following setups:

Control

The control …

Many of you heard of this nasty security vulnerability in MySQL, and as we are getting a lot of inquiries how does it affect Percona Server, I decided to address it in this post.

• The issue exists in the source code of MySQL 5.5.23 or earlier and MySQL 5.1.62 or earlier. The same is true for Percona Server, as we share the same code base.
• However binaries provided by Percona do not have this problem, as in our build process we do not use sse-optimized glibc memcmp. This is true for any version of Percona and all tar.gz, RPM and DEB packages. Once again, if you use binary builds, provided by Percona from our official download area, or from our repositories, you are safe.
• If you use your own or third-party binaries, …

I am happy to announce next version Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.24, which is mostly jump to the current version of Percona Server.

It includes an important bug fix:

• table with no PK but still having UK, can cause crash in slave using PA

Binaries are available from downloads area or from our repositories.

For this release we provide binaries for Ubuntu 12.04.

If you want to know more how to migrate to XtraDB Cluster, you can check our recent webinar Migrating To Percona XtraDB Cluster.

This is an General Availability release. We did our best to eliminate bugs and problems during alpha and …

Thanks to all who attended my webinar today. The session was recorded and will be available to watch for free soon here.

There were a lot of great questions asked during the session, so I’d like to take this opportunity to try to answer a few of them:

Q: Is there an easy way to leverage the xtrabackup SST and IST in an xtradb cluster to take your full and incremental backups of the cluster’s databases?

Well, if you noticed, all the current SST methods are just commonly used backup tools, and the SST is, in reality, just doing a full backup. So I’m not sure there’s much to leverage with SST.

The straight-forward to way to backup XtraDB Cluster (IMHO) would to simply do run your backup of choice on a node and optionally keep the node out …

Whenever I learn about a new technology, I typically want to know the major administrative touch points more than I want to know exhaustive detail about every configuration option.  Give me the gist, show me enough to get started, and give me a link to the manual.

XtraDB cluster (and Galera, the technology on which it is based) has been attracting a lot of interest in the community and we want to start presenting information about both what we know is essential, but also what we suspect will become essential as more and more production experience is logged with these important new technologies.

As such, I put together a baseline talk for getting you into a working knowledge of XtraDB …

Our previous GA release of Percona XtraDB Cluster caused a lot of interest and feedback. I am happy to announce next version Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.23, which comes with bug fixes and improvements.

List of changes:

• Fixes merged from upstream (Codership-mysql)
• Support for MyISAM, now changes to MyISAM tables are replicated to other nodes
• Improvements to XtraBackup SST methods, better error handling
• New SST wsrep_sst_method=skip, useful when you start all nodes from the same sources (i.e. backup)
• Ability to pass list of IP addresses for a new node, it will connect to the first available

Binaries are available from downloads area or from our repositories.

For …

We are running internally a lot of benchmarks on our recently announced Percona XtraDB Cluster, and I am going to publish these results soon.
But before that I wanted to mention that proper benchmark of distributed system comes with a lot of challenges.
I am saying that not to complain, but to make sure, if you are going to benchmark XtraDB Cluster yourself, there is a lot of things to take into account.

And it seems that one component, which was not much important before, now appears as critical peace, which easily can became bottleneck in the benchmarks – this is network.

In case of simple client-server setup, the network is not fully utilized.

But as …

For those wanting to become more familiar with Percona XtraDB Cluster or if you just one to test its capabilities, I have prepared an easy Vagrant setup ready to deploy.

It contains the puppet recipes to install and configure a cluster of 3 nodes and a load balancer (glb) running on the first node.

To be able to test it, these are the prerequisites you need to have on your system:

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant
• A CentOS Vagrant base box (you don’t need this one if you already have one)

Then you can find all the necessary files on my github repository: …

I am excited to announce the availability of the GA release of our new product Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Percona XtraDB Cluster is a High Availability and Scalability solution for MySQL Users and is based on Percona Server 5.5.20.

With this release we make clustering very easy and affordable for everyone. You can convert your existing MySQL replication setup into a cluster in just a couple minutes.

Tomorrow, 4-April-2012, I will be giving a webinar where I will explain what Percona XtraDB Cluster is and how does it …