Whither your rollback plan?

MySQL 5.6 upgrades are in full swing these days and knowing how to safely upgrade from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6 is important. When upgrading a replication environment, it’s important that you can build a migration plan that safely allows for your upgrade with minimal risk — rollback is often a very important component to this.

For many people this means upgrading slaves first and then the master.  The strategy of an older master replicating to a newer slave is well known and has been supported in MySQL replication for a very long time.  To be specific:  you can have a MySQL 5.6 slave of a 5.5 master and this should work fine until you upgrade your master and/or promote one of the slaves to be the master.

However, there are those of us who like to live on the edge and do …

Tools for MySQL are a vital part of any deployment, so it’s important to use ones that are reliable and well-designed. Percona Toolkit is a collection of more than 30 command-line tools for MySQL, Percona Server, and MariaDB that can help database administrators automate a variety of database and system tasks. With so many available tools, however, it can be difficult knowing where to start.

For this reason I invite you to join me on Wednesday, May 7 at 10 a.m. Pacific time for a free webinar titled, “The top 9 Percona Toolkit tools that can make your job easier.” You can register directly …

I’d like to congratulate Canonical with the new Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) Release, it really looks like a great release, and I say it having my own agenda It looks even more great because it comes with a full line of Percona Software.
If you install Ubuntu 14.04 and run aptitude search you will find:

• Percona Toolkit
• Percona XtraBackup
• Percona XtraDB Cluster
• Percona Server (as part of Percona XtraDB Cluster installation)

Percona Toolkit and …

Working as a Percona Support Engineer, every day we are seeing lots of issues related to MySQL replication. One very common issue is slave lagging. There are many reasons for slave lag but one common reason is that queries are taking more time on slave then master. How to check and log those long-running queries?  From MySQL 5.1, log-slow-slave-statements variable was introduced, which you can enable on slave and log slow queries. But what if you want to log slow queries on slave in earlier versions like MySQL 5.0?  There is a good solution/workaround: pt-query-digest. How? …

MySQL has a nice feature, slow query log, which allows you to log all queries that exceed a predefined about of time to execute. Peter Zaitsev first wrote about this back in 2006 – there have been a few other posts here on the MySQL Performance Blog since then (check this and this, too) but I wanted to revisit his original subject in today’s post.

Query optimization is essential for good database …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Toolkit 2.1.11 on March 4th, 2013 (Downloads are available here).

Bugs Fixed:
Fixed bug 1279502: –version-check behaves like spyware

The configuration for what information Percona Toolkit should retrieve is not hard-coded in the scripts. Instead, it is downloaded from v.percona.com. One of the possible parameters was the name of a binary file to execute with “–version.” This was fixed by removing the ability to execute arbitrary binary files with the version parameter. You can find more information about the benefits of …

While working on a recent support issue as a Percona Support Engineer,  I got one question from a customer asking how to monitor ALTER TABLE progress. Actually, for MySQL 5.5 and prior versions, it’s quite difficult to ALTER the table in a running production environment especially for large tables (with millions records). Because it will rebuild and lock the table affecting the performance as well as our users. Therefore even if we start ALTER it’s really important to know when it will finish. Even while creating the index, ALTER TABLE will not rebuild the table if fast_index_creation is ON but still it might lock the table.

…

One of the most expensive database operations is performing Data Definition Language (DDL, e.g. CREATE, DROP, ALTER, etc.) statements, specially, the ALTER statements because MySQL blocks the entire table for both reads and writes while modifying the table.

For the huge tables, this might take hours to get the table changed which affects the application, so that, a good planning is required for such operations in order to avoid doing these changes during the peak times. For those people who have 24/7 services or limited maintenance window, DDL on huge tables is a really nightmare.

Percona developed a very good tool called pt-online-schema-change (version 2.2.6 at the time of writing this article) to perform such operations online without blocking/affecting …

This is the first in a series of posts highlighting a few of the seldom-used but still handy Percona Toolkit tools.

Have you ever had a problem understanding the EXPLAIN statement output? And are you the type of person who would rather use the command line than a GUI application? Then I would recommend that you use Percona’s pt-visual-explain toolkit. This is one of many Percona Toolkit tools that is useful for those who want to have a different view and an easier time understanding the EXPLAIN output aside from the usual table and vertical views.

As described in the documentation – http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/2.2/pt-visual-explain.html#description

“pt-visual-explain reverse-engineers …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Toolkit 2.2.6 on December 20th, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.2 series. This release has 16 bug fixes and a few new features. One bug fix is very important, so 2.2 users are strongly encouraged to upgrade:

Fixed bug 1223458: pt-table-sync deletes child …