I recently helped a customer figure out why a minor version MySQL upgrade was indicating that some tables needed to be rebuilt. The mysql_upgrade program should be run for every upgrade, no matter how big or small the version difference is, but when only the minor version changes, I would normally not expect it to require tables to be rebuilt.

Turns out some of their tables were still marked with an older MySQL version, which could mean a few things… most likely that something went wrong with a previous upgrade, or that the tables were copied from a server with an older version.

In cases like this, did you know there is a fast, safe and simple way to check the version associated with a table? You can do this by reading the FRM file, following the format specification found here.

If you look at that page, you’ll see that the …

Martin Arrieta and I gave an online presentation last week on “Putting MySQL Fabric To Use.” If you missed it, you can find a recording and the slides here, and the vagrant environment we used plus a transcript of the commands we ran here (be sure to check out the ‘sharding’ branch, as that’s what we used during the webinar).

Thank you all for attending and asking interesting questions. We were unable to answer all of them in the scheduled time, so here are our replies to all the questions.

What is GTID? And how does it relate to MySQL Fabric?
GTID stands for Global …

This is the fourth post in our MySQL Fabric series. In case you’re joining us now, we started with an introductory post, and then discussed High Availability (HA) using MySQL Fabric here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). Today we will talk about how MySQL Fabric can help you scale out MySQL databases with sharding.

Introduction

At the time of writing, MySQL Fabric includes support for range- and hash-based sharding. As with HA, the functionality is split between client, through a MySQL Fabric-aware connector; and server, through the mysqlfabric utility and …

This is the third post in our MySQL Fabric series. If you missed the previous two, we started with an overall introduction, and then a discussion of MySQL Fabric’s high-availability (HA) features. MySQL Fabric was RC when we started this series, but it went GA recently. You can read the press release here, and see this blog post from Oracle’s Mats Kindahl for more details. In our previous post, we showed a simple HA setup managed with MySQL Fabric, including some basic failure scenarios. …

In our previous post, we introduced the MySQL Fabric utility and said we would dig deeper into it. This post is the first part of our test of MySQL Fabric’s High Availability (HA) functionality.

Today, we’ll review MySQL Fabric’s HA concepts, and then walk you through the setup of a 3-node cluster with one Primary and two Secondaries, doing a few basic tests with it. In a second post, we will spend more time generating failure scenarios and documenting how Fabric handles them. (MySQL Fabric is an extensible framework to manage large farms of MySQL servers, with support for high-availability and sharding.)

Before we begin, we recommend you read this post by Oracle’s …

While built-in replication has been a major cause for MySQL’s wide adoption, official tools to help DBAs manage replication topologies have typically been missing from the picture. The community has produced many good products to fill in this gap, but recently, Oracle has been filling it too with the addition of MySQL Utilities to the mix.

One part of the Utilities that has been generating interest recently is MySQL Fabric, and we will be discussing this project in an upcoming series of blog …

I’m happy to announce that the recording for my recent webinar “5 Proactive Measures to Minimize MySQL Downtime” is now available, along with the slides. They can both be found here.

My webinar focused on the top 5 operational measures that prevent or reduce downtime — along with the related business impact in a significant number of customer emergency scenarios.

As a senior consultant on Percona’s 24×7 Emergency Consulting team, I’ve helped resolve a …

Failure is an unavoidable part of IT life, but it does not always have to imply MySQL service downtime. In the years I have been working at Percona, I have been involved in many customer emergency cases, and I have seen a good number of problems that could have been avoided or alleviated if relatively simple proactive measures were taken.

On July 17th 2013, at 10 a.m. PDT, I will be delivering a webinar focused on presenting the Top 5 such measures, with the objective of helping you assess your current situation, and implement any needed changes to avoid production downtime in the future. The webinar is titled: “5 Proactive Measures to Minimize MySQL Downtime.”

Later that day, I will be delivering the …

I'm happy to extend a warm welcome to two new members of the Percona team.

First is Yves Trudeau, about whom I can say many things:

• One of the top MySQL Cluster (NDB Cluster) experts in the world.
• An expert on all things High Availability, including DRBD and Heartbeat.
• Many years of experience with Huge Data.
• Half of the Waffle Grid team.
• A really nice person!

Yves joins us after a tenure of several years as a senior consultant at Sun/MySQL. Together with Matt Yonkovit, he plans to work on WaffleGrid (but as a new project under a new name, to be determined), and integration with XtraDB. Yves lives in Quebec with his family.

Next is Fernando Ipar. Fernando is our first dedicated Shift Support Captain[1]. Fernando specializes in MySQL, GNU/Linux, systems administration, and high availability. Fernando has been involved in computer programming since …