When a new version of MySQL is about to be released we read a lot of blog posts about the performance and scalability improvements. That’s good but sometimes we miss some small features that can help us a lot in our day-to-day tasks. One good example is the blog post that Aurimas wrote about a new small feature in MySQL 5.6 that I didn’t know about until I read it: the Automatic InnoDB transaction log file size change. How cool is that?

I plan to write a series of blog posts that will show some of those small new features in MySQL 5.7 that are going to be really useful. I’m going to start with EXPLAIN FOR CONNECTION.

This feature allows us to run an EXPLAIN for an already running statement. Let’s say that you find a query …

Data inconsistencies in replication environments are a pretty common. There are lots of posts that explain how to fix those using pt-table-checksum and pt-table-sync. Usually we only care about the data but from time to time we receive this question in support:

How can I check the table definition consistency between servers?

Replication also allow us to have different table definition between master and slaves. For example, there are some cases that you need some indexes on slaves for querying purposes but are not really needed on the master. There are some other cases where those differences are just a mistake that needs to be fixed.

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We have been using SHOW ENGINE INNODB MUTEX command for years. It shows us mutex and rw-lock information that could be useful during service troubleshooting in case of performance problems. As Morgan Tocker announced in his blog post the command will be removed from MySQL 5.7 and we have to use performance_schema to get that info.

The documentation of MySQL also says that most of the command output has been removed from 5.6 and that we can find similar info in performance_schema. It doesn’t show any examples of how to use performance_schema or what is the query we need to use from now on. It is also important to mention that 5.6 doesn’t show any warning about the feature being deprecated.

This is a short blog post to show how to configure performance_schema and get the info we need. Hoping it will end …

Performance Schema (P_S) has been available since MySQL 5.5, more than 4 years ago. It is still difficult to see production servers with P_S enabled, even with MySQL 5.6 where the feature is enabled by default. There have been several complaints like the overhead, that the fix is a work in progress, and the ease of use. 52 tables to query and 31 configuration variables is enough to scare people.

There is a solution for the second problem, the usability. It’s name is “sys schema“. It is a collection of views, functions and procedures to make P_S more user friendly.

Installation

If you are a MySQL Workbench user the installation is pretty easy because sys schema is already included. You just need to install it. Click on “Performance – Performance Reports” and there you will find the “Install Helper” button that will install sys schema. …

The combination of max_allowed_packet variable and replication in MySQL is a common source of headaches. In a nutshell, max_allowed_packet is the maximum size of a MySQL network protocol packet that the server can create or read. It has a default value of 1MB (<= 5.6.5) or 4MB (>= 5.6.6) and a maximum size of 1GB. This adds some constraints in our replication environment:

• The master server shouldn’t write events to the binary log larger than max_allowed_packet

• All the slaves in the replication chain should have the same max_allowed_packet as the master server

Sometimes, even following those two basic rules we can have problems.

For example, there are situations (also called bugs) where the master writes more data than the max_allowed_packet …

In my last blog post I explained how to use Percona ClusterControl to create a new Percona XtraDB Cluster from scratch. That’s a good option when you want to create a testing environment in just some mouse clicks. In this case I’m going to show you how to add your existing cluster to Percona ClusterControl so you can manage and monitor it on the web interface.

The environment will be pretty similar, we will have UI, CMON and 3 XtraDB Cluster nodes. The cluster should be already running and Percona ClusterControl also installed.

Adding an existing Cluster

The ClusterControl web interface is empty, there are no clusters on it. To add an existing one …

Table structures are stored in .frm files and in the InnoDB Data Dictionary. Sometimes, usually in data recovery issues, we need to recover those structures to be able to find the lost data or just to recreate the tables.

There are different ways to do it and we’ve already written about it in this blog. For example, we can use the data recovery tools to recover table structures from InnoDB Dictionary or from the .frm files using a MySQL Server. This blog post will be an update of that last one. I will show you how to easily recover the structure from a .frm file and in some cases even …

Recently Oracle announced several new features for the latest available development version of MySQL that is 5.7.2 at the time of writing this article. Most of them are performance and replication related that show us how incredible the new release will be.

In this post I’m going to try to explain in some easy steps how the new multi-source replication works and how we can configure it for our own tests. It is important to mention that this is a development release, so it is not production ready. Therefore this post is intend to people that want to test the new feature and see how it works with their application, always in a staging environment.

What is multi-source replication?

First, we need to have clear that multi-master and multi-source replication are not the same. Multi-Master replication is the usual circular replication where you can write on any server and data gets replicated …

We receive this question about the ibdata1 file in MySQL very often in Percona Support.

The panic starts when the monitoring server sends an alert about the storage of the MySQL server – saying that the disk is about to get filled.

After some research you realize that most of the disk space is used by the InnoDB’s shared tablespace ibdata1. You have innodb_file_per_table enabled, so the question is:

What is stored in ibdata1?

When you have innodb_file_per_table enabled, the tables are stored in their own tablespace but the shared tablespace is still used to store other InnoDB’s internal …