Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.21-25.0 on March 20th, 2012. Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories.

Based on MySQL 5.5.21, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.21-25.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.5.21-25.0 milestone at Launchpad.

I am writing a specification for updating pt-online-schema-change. The outline of the changes I want to make is here: http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/ptdev:blueprints:redesign-pt-online-schema-change

The idea is to make the tool Do The Right Thing, with features such as automatically throttling its operation to avoid causing replicas to lag. Many of the features and improvements are similar to those added to the newly rewritten pt-table-checksum.

If you have any comments on it, please write to the mailing list with your suggestions. Thanks!

Percona Toolkit version 2.0.4 is available for immediate download. This release fixes 25 bugs and is a bug-fix release only, with the exception of a minor new filtering option for pt-kill. The change log is available on Launchpad. There are links to the documentation, downloads, bug reporting system, and mailing list on the toolkit homepage.

Percona Toolkit is open-source and free, but we recommend a support contract, which entitles you to bug fixes and assistance using the tools, among other benefits.

With this release we are introducing a new release model, which matches most people’s expectations of a software lifecycle. We will place all new features into the upcoming series (currently the 2.1 series) and only fix bugs in the current (2.0) series. When 2.1 is released as GA, we will freeze its features and begin work on 2.2, and so on. After the 2.0.3 release, which included complete rewrites of some tools, it was obvious that our policy of including both bug fixes and major changes into the same release was too confusing. This new release model should require a lot less thought from users: upgrade to a release series and keep upgrading as we fix bugs; we won’t make major changes.

Percona is glad to announce the second beta release towards Percona XtraBackup 2.0! We call this version 1.9.1 as we are using the 1.9.x version numbers for betas of 2.0 to clearly differentiate beta releases from the final 2.0 release. We do not recommend using Beta releases in production. Link to BETA version and Release notes.

If you are looking for a stable release for production use, check out our latest stable release (which was 1.6.5 at the time of writing).

This beta adds some really exciting features and bug fixes.

New features include:

• Backup and restore of LRU dump.
  For servers that support  dump and restore of the XtraDB buffer pool (LRU), namely Percona Server, this will enable a server restored from backup to give excellent performance without a lengthy “warm up” time. If provisioning a slave, this means your new slave will end up with a warmed up buffer pool to mimic that of the master.
• Streaming incremental backups.
  It is now possible to stream incremental backups, lifting a limitation from previous versions where it was only possible to stream full backups.
• Parallel compression
  Percona XtraBackup can now use multiple CPUs to perform a compressed backup, significantly reducing the amount of time needed.
• Parallel compression (‘--compress-threads‘) can be used together with parallel file copying (‘--parallel‘). For example, ‘--parallel=4 --compress --compress-threads=2‘ will create 4 IO threads that will read the data and pipe it to 2 compression threads.
• New streaming format to work with parallel compression.
  The xbstream format is now supported along with the tar format. The new xbstream format works with parallel compression to (without caching) stream several compressed files at once.
• tar4ibd functionality is replaced by functionality in the xtrabackup binary itself.
• The xbstream utility is added
  This utility has a tar like interface to the xbstream format.

We are on our way to delivery a production ready release of Percona XtraDB Cluster by the end March-2012.
We will do couple events to cover features and architecture of XtraDB Cluster.

• I will give a talk on San Francisco MySQL Meetup, on March-21: Percona’s new HA solution for MySQL with XtraDB Cluster. If you are in the area, I hope to see you there. I will give away some good stuff, including free copies of our new book: High Performance MySQL, 3rd edition
• Webinar on April-4 A New High Availability Solution for MySQL

. If you are not in San Francisco and can’t not make to MySQL Conference, you may attend webinar.

• Tutorial on PL MySQL Conference Galera Synchronous Multi-Master Replication for MySQL. As I expect, the whole Codership Oy team will be on the conference – this is a good chance to meet with developers of Galera.
• My talk on PL MySQL Conference Percona XtraDB Cluster: New HA solution.
• Out book «High Performance MySQL, 3rd edition» has couple pages dedicated to Percona XtraDB Cluster

So if you interested to hear or read more on this topic, there is good deal: Register for conference before 1-Mar-2012 with code PL-Book, and you will receive our book for free (in the additional to ridiculously low early-bird prices).

Follow @VadimTk

I am happy to announce the availability of beta release of our new product Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Percona XtraDB Cluster is High Availability and Scalability solution for MySQL Users and the beta release is based on Percona Server 5.5.20 and the recently released Galera 2.0 GA

The main focus in this release:

• Incremental State Transfer, especially useful for WAN deployments
• Support of Percona XtraBackup for Snapshot State Transfer. This feature is available in pre-release series for XtraBackup 2.0

Despite Galera 2.0 has status “production ready”, we still name our release “beta”, as
we want to give an additional attention on an integration of Galera with Percona Server features and
on using XtraBackup for SST. Please test it if you are going to try XtraDB Cluster.

Percona XtraDB Cluster provides:

• Synchronous replication. Transaction either commited on all nodes or none.
• Multi-master replication. You can write to any node.
• Parallel applying events on slave. Real “parallel replication”.
• Automatic node provisioning.
• Data consistency. No more unsyncronised slaves.

Percona XtraDB Cluster is fully compatible with MySQL or Percona Server in the following meaning:

• Data compatibility. Percona XtraDB Cluster works with databases created in MySQL / Percona Server
• Application compatibility. There is no or minimal application changes required to start work with Percona XtraDB Cluster

Please note, this is a beta release, not suitable for production yet. Bugs and some rough edges are expected. We are encouraging you to try and play with it in testing environment and report us your feedback and experience.

We expect to have a production-ready release by the end of March 2012.

Links:

• We provide tar.gz and RPM binaries for RedHat (CentOS, Oracle Linux) 5 and 6, and Debian packages.
  Downloads: http://www.percona.com/downloads/Percona-XtraDB-Cluster/
• Documentation
  Codership Wiki
• General Discussion group
• Launchpad project
• Bug reports

Previous posts on this topic:

• Percona XtraDB Cluster Feature 1: High Availability
• Percona XtraDB Cluster Feature 2: Multi-Master replication

Follow @VadimTk

DBD::mysql 4.014 breaks pt-table-checksum 2.0.  The cause is unknown, but the effect is a lot of errors like:

DBD::mysql::st execute failed: called with 2 bind variables when 6 are needed [for Statement "..." with ParamValues: ...] at ./pt-table-checksum line 7216.

The fix is simple: upgrade (or even downgrade) DBD::mysql to any version except 4.014. To see which version of DBD::mysql a system has, execute:

perl -MDBD::mysql -e 'print $DBD::mysql::VERSION, "\n";'

This bug may affect other Percona Toolkit tools, but currently pt-table-checksum 2.0 is the only victim. This bug does not affect pt-table-checksum 1.0, and it cannot be worked around in pt-table-checksum 2.0 because the bug in in DBD::mysql.

This bug affects pt-table-checksum 2.0 but not 1.0 because the newer version uses prepared statements with parameter values, whereas the older version does not. It seems, although I have not verified this, that DBD::mysql 4.014 has some sort of caching mechanism which causes it to use the wrong prepared statement.

We’ve released a new set of monitoring plugins for MySQL servers and related software. With these plugins, you can set up world-class graphing and monitoring for your MySQL servers, using your own on-premises Cacti and Nagios software. The Cacti plugins are derived from an existing set of templates we’ve been using for several years, but the Nagios check plugins are brand new. They are informed by the research we did into the causes and preventions of MySQL downtime.

Like all Percona software, the plugins are open-source and free, licensed under the GNU GPL. The source code and issue tracker are hosted at Launchpad. The 0.9.0 release is ready to download now, and the reference manual is also online. In the next release we will integrate this into our package management, so you can install through YUM and APT repositories.

The new monitoring plugins add first-rate support for MySQL to popular enterprise opensource monitoring systems, and that’s why we’ve added them to the list of software included in our support contracts. If you’re an existing customer of Percona’s MySQL Support services, your contract automatically covers these new plugins, too; you don’t need a new contract for that. Under the support contract, you’ll get help installing, configuring, troubleshooting, and administering your monitoring plugins, as well as being entitled to bug fixes. And as always, we’re also available to extend the plugins to support your environment or broaden the range of systems and software that they can monitor.

Please use the Launchpad bug tracker to report issues. Happy monitoring!

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.61-13.2 on February 10th, 2012 (Downloads are available from Percona Server 5.1.61-13.2 downloads and from the Percona Software Repositories).

Based on MySQL 5.1.61, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.61-13.2 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona ‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.1.61-13.2 milestone at Launchpad.

The full release notes can be found in our online documentation: http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.1/release-notes/Percona-Server-5.1.61-13.2.html

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 1.6.5 on 10 February, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories).

This release is purely composed of bug fixes and is the current stable release of Percona XtraBackup.

There are some important bug fixes around incremental backups, parallel backups and backups on databases with the system tablespace being multiple files. The full release notes and details are available here: http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/release-notes/1.6/1.6.5.html