Many of you have seen the announcement for our Percona Live in Washington, DC in January! But did you know we also have our highly rated MySQL Training coming to Washington, DC the week of January 16h? Full details can be found on the Percona website. If you would like to attend the MySQL Training, click here to register and receive a 20% discount.

We are pleased to announce availability of an early access version of Percona’s PAM Authentication plugin for MySQL. This plugin supports MySQL-5.5.x, Percona Server 5.5.x and MariaDB 5.2.x. The PAM Authentication plugin can be used for:

• MySQL authentication using operating system users (pam_unix)
• MySQL authentication from LDAP server (pam_ldap)
• authentication against RSA SecurID server
• any other authentication methods that provides access via PAM

We name it early access as it does not yet have the full list of features we want to implement. It is currently functional and we want to make it available for everybody. In this version you still need to create individual users in MySQL (even though they will be authenticated via PAM), in the final (non-early …

When I started with MySQL 3.22 I would start running MySQL from early beta (if not alpha) and update MySQL the same date as release would hit the web. Since that time I matured and so did MySQL ecosystem. MySQL is powering a lot more demanding and business critical applications now than 12 years ago and it also a lot more complicated product with more things which can go wrong. I see a lot fewer customers running their systems on non GA software and a lot more customers running MySQL few major version behind the most current one – if you’re not running the most demanding or quickly changing application it well might be good enough.

Many users select rather traditional/prudent approach these days and will only start considering upgrade to next major MySQL version 6+ months after release. MySQL 5.5 is out almost a year ago and I would still estimate more people running on MySQL or Percona Server 5.1 than 5.5 Facebook also sticks with …

We are happy to see that Percona Server/XtraDB and XtraBackup are raising popularity and to keep excitement we want to have more features and more performance fixes! If you are experienced software engineer and feel strong enough to hack InnoDB/XtraDB code we invite you to join our development team to work on the following (but not limited to) problems:

• Fix InnoDB flushing problems, e.g: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/09/18/disaster-mysql-5-5-flushing/
• Fix InnoDB index locking
• Figure out InnoDB adaptive locking issue, e.g: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/02/25/index-lock-and-adaptive-search-next-two-biggest-innodb-problems/
• Make …

When I mention Galera replication as in my previous post on this topic, the most popular question is how does it affect performance.

Of course you may expect performance overhead, as in case with Galera replication we add some network roundtrip and certification process. How big is it ? In this post I am trying to present some data from my benchmarks.

For tests I use tpcc-mysql, datasize 600W (~60GB) with buffer pool 52GB. Workload is run under 48 user connections.
Hardware:

• 1st node: HP ProLiant DL380 G6
• 2nd node: Dell PowerEdge R815
• Both nodes use …

It is known that MySQL due internal limitations is not able to utilize
all CPU and IO resources available on modern hardware.
Idea is to run multiple instances of MySQL to gain better performance on Fusion-io ioDrive card.

Full report is available in PDF

For tests we used tpcc-mysql package, which generates TPCC-like workload on MySQL systems.

• Server hardware: Dell PowerEdge R815
• Storage: Fusion-io ioDrive Duo 640GB MLC. Fusion-io driver version: 2.3.1 build 123; Firmware v5.0.7, rev 101971
• Software: Percona Server 5.5.15
• Client hardware: IBM x3650

Fusion-io ioDrive Duo 640GB MLC card was provided by Fusion-io.

More details on hardware and software …

Codership team published beta2 of MySQL 5.5.15 with Galera replication
https://launchpad.net/codership-mysql
and we made port to Percona Server:

source code:
lp:~percona-dev/percona-server/percona-server-galera-5.5.15
binaries for RedHat/CentOS 6:
http://www.percona.com/downloads/TESTING/Galera/Percona-XtraDB-Galera-5.5.15.tar.gz

What difference between Percona Server+Galera and MySQL 5.5.15 ?
First of course, Percona Server+Galera is based on our XtraDB engine.
Second, we provide wsrep_sst_xtrabackup script, which allows to use Percona XtraBackup for node provisioning.
Percona Server+Galera is still on early stage, and we make it available so you can play it to gain some …

I am very happy to welcome Patrick Crews to the Percona development team. Patrick joins Percona at a very exciting time for the development team. We are getting regular releases of Percona Server and Percona Xtrabackup out the door, we have been heavily using the Jenkins continuous integration system to maintain and improve the quality of the products we ship and we just upgraded our documentation publishing platform for both Percona Server (5.1 and 5.5) and …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 1.6.3 on 22 September, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories).

This release is purely composed of bug fixes and is the current stable release of Percona Xtrabackup.

If the innodb_file_per_table server option is being used and DDL operations, TRUNCATE TABLE, DROP/CREATE the_same_table or ALTER statements on InnoDB tables are executed while taking a backup, an upgrade to XtraBackup 1.6.3 is strongly recommended. Under this scenario, if the server version is prior to 5.5.11 in 5.5 series or prior to 5.1.49 in 5.1 series, a server upgrade is …

Daniel and I and the Percona release engineering team are proud to announce version 1.0.1 of Percona Toolkit. This toolkit is Percona’s suite of DBA and sysadmin productivity tools for MySQL. It is the successor to the popular Maatkit and Aspersa toolkits. Percona Toolkit is available for immediate download at percona.com/downloads/percona-toolkit/.

Helpful links:

• Reference Manual and Documentation
• Launchpad Project
• Bug Reports
• …