From left: Liz van Dijk, Frédéric Descamps and Kenny Gryp

If you’re following this blog, it’s quite likely you’re already aware of the Percona Live London 2014 conference coming up in just a few days. Just in case, though (you know, if you’re still looking for an excuse to sign up), I wanted to put a spotlight on the tutorial to be delivered by my esteemed colleagues Frédéric Descamps (@lefred) and Kenny Gryp (@gryp), and …

Given the recent excitement & interest around OpenStack I wanted to make sure I was ready to conduct appropriate evaluations of system performance.  I generally turn to sysbench since it comes with a variety of different tests (accessed via –test= option interface), including:

• fileio – File I/O test
• cpu – CPU performance test
• memory – Memory functions speed test
• threads – Threads subsystem performance test
• mutex – Mutex performance test

As you can see, sysbench lets you stress many of the fundamental components of your hardware and infrastructure, such as your disk subsystem, along with your CPUs and memory. An additional option exists that is designed to perform synthetic stress testing of MySQL, and I was surprised when I didn’t see it in the above list on version 0.5, as it used to show up as “oltp – OLTP test”. What happened to …

In the first post in a series on MariaDB features we find interesting, we begin with selectively skipping replication of binlog events. This feature is available on MariaDB 5.5 and 10.

By default when using MySQL’s standard replication, all events are logged in the binary log and those binary log events are replicated to all slaves (it’s possible to filter out some schema). But with this feature, it’s also possible to bypass some events to be replicated on the slave(s) even if they are written in the binary log. Having those event in the binary logs is always useful for point-in-time recovery.

Indeed, usually when we need to not replicate an event, we set sql_log_bin = 0 and the event is bypassed: neither …

There is one new feature in MySQL 5.6 that didn’t get the attention it deserved (at least from me ) : “DATA DIRECTORY” for InnoDB tables.

This is implemented since MySQL 5.6.6 and can be used only at the creation of the table. It’s not possible to change the DATA DIRECTORY with an ALTER for a normal table (but it’s in some case with partitioned ones as you will see below). If you do so, the option will be just ignored:

mysql> CREATE TABLE `sales_figures` (
    ->   `region_id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
    ->   `sales_date` date DEFAULT NULL,
    ->   `amount` int(11) DEFAULT NULL
    -> ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
    -> DATA DIRECTORY = '/tb1/';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.11 sec)
mysql> alter table sales_figures engine=innodb data directory='/tb2/';
Query OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.21 sec)
Records: 0  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 1
mysql> show warnings; …

Lefred and I spent a bit of time making innotop 1.9.1.
We’ve released a new version mainly to include MySQL 5.6 support as well as including some bugs fixed by Baron Schwartz and Frédéric Descamps.

You can download the .tar.gz and rpm’s (new!) at
http://code.google.com/p/innotop/downloads/list

Bugs fixed:

• Issue 71: DBI prints to STDERR instead of just throwing an inactive statement error
• Issue …

With the last Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) release, two major features were added:

* a new command to bootstrap the cluster was added to the init script
* SST via Xtrabackup now supports Xtrabackup 2.1 features

In this post, I want to explain the benefits of these added features and how to use them.

If you follow the mysqlperformanceblog regularly, you’ve already noticed that there are several ways to start a node and that it’s not always easy to start the node that is supposed to bootstrap the entire cluster.

See :
- …

Frédéric Descamps of Percona.

Percona Toolkit is Maatkit & Aspersa combined. Opensource and the tools are very useful for a DBA.

You need Perl, DBI, DBD::mysql, Term::ReadKey. Most tools are written in Perl, and whatever is in Bash is being re-written in Perl. There is also a tarball or RPM or DEB packages.

Know your environment. The hardware & OS are crucial for you to know. How much memory/CPU do you use? Do you use swap? Is this a physical/virtual machine? Do you have free space? What kind of RAID controller? Volumes? Disk? What about the network interfaces? What IO schedulers are used? Which filesystem is the data stored on? To answer all that, just use pt-summary.

Know your MySQL environment. Version? Build? How many databases? Where is the data …