About a month ago I needed to compare tens of thousands of tables in hundreds of databases between a few different servers. The obvious choice was, mk-table-checksum! The only problem was, that the tool needs to know the minimum and maximum value of the column by which each table is to be subdivided into chunks and checksummed. This select min(col), max(col) from table locks all write operations on the table and on a big table it meant downtime.

Looking at the source it was clear we could make mk-table-checksum run the select min(col), max(col) from table on the read-only slave and use the values to checksum the master.

It was subtle code changes in function:
get_range_statistics adding

my $cxn_string_dc = “DBI:mysql:;host=slavehost;port=3306;mysql_read_default_group=client”;
my $user = ‘user’;
my $pass = ‘password’;
my $dbh_slave = DBI->connect($cxn_string_dc, $user, $pass); …

In October 2008, Baron posted How to Check MySQL Replication Integrity Continually. Here at Pythian we have developed a method based on that post, and added “verifying that masters and slaves are in sync” to our standard battery of tests.

We call it “Continual replication sync checking”. This article will explain how it works, how to test and make the procedure non-blocking, benchmarks from the real world, issues we encountered along the way, and …

Generally I avoid going down rabbit holes but today I decided to see how deep a particular testing rabbit hole went. This post is a third in what seems be a continuing series of programming anecdotes. It’s not particularly MySQL-related so you can stop reading here unless you grok code stuff.

Before beginning work on issue 720 I ran the mk-table-checksum test suite to make sure it was in working order. No sense writing new tests and code when the old tests and code aren’t reliable. I actually made one seemingly innocuous change to the test suite in preparation for the issue: I changed the –replicate checksum table from MyISAM to InnoDB.

Surprisingly, the test suite proved unstable. Random tests would fail at random times. Some instability was due to new tests for …

Here’s a sneak peek at a video matrix — this is all the videos that include Pythian Group employees at the MySQL conference. I hope to have all the rest of the videos processed and uploaded within 24 hours, with a matrix similar to the one below (but of course with many more sessions).

Last night at the Boston MySQL User Group I presented on how to get a consistent snapshot to build a slave, how to use mk-table-checksum to check for differences between masters and slaves on an ongoing basis, and how to use tools such as mk-table-sync and mysqldump to sync the data if there are any discrepancies.

The slides are online at http://technocation.org/files/doc/slave_sync.pdf.

The video can be watched on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un0wqYKmbWY or directly in your browser with the embedded player below: