On a recent engagement I worked with a customer who makes extensive use of UUID() values for their Primary Key and stores it as char(36), and their row count on this example table has grown to over 1 billion rows.

The table is INSERT-only (no UPDATEs or DELETEs), and the bulk of their retrieval are PK lookups. Lookups by PK were performing acceptably, but they were concerned with the space usage by the table as we were approaching 1TB (running with innodb_file_per_table=1 and Percona Server 5.5).

This schema model presents an increasing burden for backups since they use Percona XtraBackup, and so the question was asked: does their choice of an effectively random Primary Key based on UUID() impact their on-disk storage, and to what extent? And as a neat trick I show towards the end of this post how you can calculate the …

One of our Percona Support customers recently reported that Percona XtraBackup failed with a page corruption error on an InnoDB table. The customer thought it was a problem or bug in the Percona XtraBackup tool. After investigation we found that an InnoDB page was actually corrupted and a Percona XtraBackup tool caught the error as expected and hence the backup job failed.

I thought this would be an interesting topic and worthy of a blog post. In this article I will describe the innochecksum tool, when and how to use it and what are the possible fixes if an InnoDB table suffers from …

This past week was marked by a series of personal findings related to the use of Global Transaction IDs (GTIDs) on Galera-based clusters such as Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC). The main one being the fact that transactions touching MyISAM tables (and FLUSH PRIVILEGES!) issued on a giving node of the cluster are recorded on a GTID set bearing the node’s server_uuid as “source id” and added to the binary log (if the node has binlog enabled), thus being replicated to any async replicas connected to it. However, they won’t be replicated across the cluster (that is, all of this is by design, if wsrep_replicate_myisam is …

In a previous post, titled “Multi-threaded replication with MySQL 5.6: Use GTIDs,” I explained that using GTID replication is almost a requirement when using MySQL 5.6 MTS. Let’s see now how to perform the day-to-day operations when MTS and GTIDs are both enabled. (I’ll also be presenting a related webinar next week titled “Multi-threaded Replication in MySQL 5.6 and 5.7″).

Seeing the execution gaps

If you have a look at SHOW SLAVE STATUS while the slave is running, you may not be expecting such an output:

[...]
Executed_Gtid_Set: …

Background on Backup Locks

I was very excited to see Backup locks support in release notes for the latest Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.21 release. For those who are not aware, backup locks offer an alternative to FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK (FTWRL) in Xtrabackup. While Xtrabackup can hot-copy Innodb, everything else in MySQL must be locked (usually briefly) to get a consistent snapshot that lines up with Innodb. This includes all other storage engines, but also things like table schemas (even on Innodb) and async replication binary logs. You can skip this lock, but it isn’t …

In MySQL 5.6 Oracle introduced a Transportable Tablespace feature (copying tablespaces to another server) and Percona Server adopted it for partial backups which means you can now take individual database or table backups and your destination server can be a vanilla MySQL server. Moreover, since Percona Server 5.6, innodb_import_table_from_xtrabackup is obsolete as Percona Server also implemented Oracle MySQL’s transportable tablespaces feature which as I mentioned gives you the ability to copy tablespace (table.ibd) between servers. Let me demonstrate this through one example where I am going to take partial backup of selective tables instead of an entire MySQL server and restore it on a running MySQL …

MySQL database usage is popular in OpenStack. Core OpenStack services for Compute (Nova), Storage (Cinder), Neutron (Networking), Image (Glance) and Identity (Keystone) all use MySQL database.

MySQL – as the world’s most popular database, runs inside OpenStack Virtual Machines and serves as database backend to OpenStack cloud based applications. The MySQL instances can be configured to run in virtual machines manually (by simply installing MySQL inside a VM and running it) or can be created in an on-demand fashion by OpenStack Database-as-a-Service (Trove).

In either case, the MySQL data is mission-critical. OpenStack cloud administrators and cloud guests/tenants need the ability to backup and restore their MySQL databases. mysqldump is traditional way of doing MySQL backups and restores. However, based on previous experiences of the MySQL community, it is widely known that mysqldump has …

Founded in 1998, Rackspace has evolved over the years to address the way customers are using data – and more specifically, databases. The San Antonio-based company is fueling the adoption of cloud computing among organizations large and small.

Today Rackspace is doubling down on open source database technologies. Why? Because that’s where the industry is heading, according to Sean Anderson, Manager of Data Services at Rackspace. The company, he said, created a separate business unit of 100+ employees focused solely on database workloads.

The key technologies under the hood include both relational databases (e.g., MySQL, Percona Server, and MariaDB) and NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, Redis, and Apache Hadoop).

Last July Rackspace …

MySQL is the database of choice for most OpenStack components (Ceilometer is a notable exception). If you start with a small deployment, it will probably run like a charm. But as soon as the dataset grows, you will suddenly face several challenges. We will write a series of blog posts explaining the issues you may hit and how to overcome them.

Where is MySQL used in OpenStack?

Have a look at the logical diagram of OpenStack below (click the image for a larger view).

The diagram is a bit outdated: Neutron appears as Quantum and newer components like Heat are not pictured. But it shows that a database has to be used to store metadata or runtime information. And although …

The need to have multiple instances of MySQL (the well-known mysqld process) running in the same server concurrently in a transparent way, instead of having them executed in separate containers/virtual machines, is not very common. Yet from time to time the Percona Support team receives a request from a customer to assist in the configuration of such an environment. MySQL provides a tool to facilitate the execution of multiple instances called mysqld_multi:

“mysqld_multi is designed to manage several mysqld processes that listen for connections on different Unix socket files and TCP/IP ports. It can start or stop servers, or report their current status.”

For tests and development purposes, …