MySQL Support Engineer's Chronicles, Issue #4

This week I had to deal with some unusual problems. But let me start with Percona's xtrabackup, software that I consider a key component of many current production MySQL setups and use regularly. Recently new minor versions of XtraBackup were released, check the details on 2.4.5, for example. It made a step towards support of MariaDB 10.2, but it's still a long way to go, see this pull request #200.

My main problem with xtrabackup, though, is not with lack of support of MariaDB 10,2-specific features. Why should they care, after all... The problem is that old well known bugs and problems are not resolved, those that may affect all MySQL versions, forks and environments. Check lp:1272329 , "innobackupex dies if a directory is not readable. i.e.: lost+found", for example. Why not to read and take into account ignore_db_dir option (as server does) and let those poor souls who used mount point as a datadir to make backups? Check even older problem, passwords that are not hidden in the command lines, see lp:907280, "innobackupex script shows the password in the ps output, when its passed as a command line argument". My colleague Hartmut even suggested the fix recently, see pull request #289.

Because of these old, known problems (some of them being low hanging fruits) that are not fixed users still suffer while using xtrabackup way more often than they would like to. One day, as a result, they'll have to switch to some other online backup tools or approaches. One may dream about extended myrocks_hotbackup to cover InnoDB one day (when MyRocks and InnoDB will work together in one instance), or just use Percona TokuBackup (after adding script to go SST for Galera with it, maybe), or try something totally different. Anyway, I feel that if more bugs (including low hanging fruits) in xtrabackup are not getting fixed and pull requests are not actively accepted, the tool may become much less relevant and used soon.

I had to deal with MaxScale-related issues this week, so I'd like to remind those who use Docker for testing about https://github.com/asosso/maxscale-docker/blob/master/Dockerfile. Personally I prefer to build from source. In any case, I'd like us all to remember that in older versions one may have to set strip_db_esc option explicitly for service to deal with database names containing underscore (_). Recent 2.0.x versions have it enabled by default (see MXS-801).

I also had to explain how online ALTER TABLE works, specifically, when it sets exclusive metadata locks in the process. I still do not see this topic properly explained in the manual, so I had to report Bug #84004, "Manual misses details on MDL locks set and released for online ALTER TABLE".


By no means I am a developer for 11 years already, even less one should expect writing Java code from me. Anyway, I had to explain how to replace Oracle's ref_cursors (a.k.a cursor variables) in MySQL, both in stored procedures and in Java code that calls them. If you are wondering what is this about, check this fine manual. Note that this feature is missing in MySQL, even though it was suggested to implement it here. In general, MySQL allows just to run SELECTs in stored procedures and then in Java you can process each of the result sets returned any way you want. Things may get more complicated when more than one result set is produced, and they are even more complicated in Oracle with nested cursor expressions. So, I plan to devote a separate blog post to this topic one day. Stay tuned.

I answer questions coming not only from customers. Old friends, community users out of nowhere and, even more, colleagues are welcomed to discuss whatever MySQL- or MariaDB-related  problem they may have. If I know how to help, I'll do this, otherwise I'll quickly explain that I am of no good use. This is how I ended up testing MariaDB's CONNECT storage engine quickly as a replacement for the Federated engine, that is, to link table to a remote MySQL table. Basic instructions on how to set it up and use MySQL type looked simple, but when I tried to test on Fedora 23 and hit a problem of missing libodbc.so.1:

MariaDB [(none)]> INSTALL SONAME 'ha_connect';
ERROR 1126 (HY000): Can't open shared library '/home/openxs/dbs/mariadb10.1/lib/plugin/ha_connect.so'
  (errno: 2, libodbc.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)

the solution was not really straightforward. First of all I had to install unixODBC.x86_64 2.3.4-1.fc23 RPM, but it also does not provide libodbc.so.1:

[openxs@fc23 node2]$ find / -name libodbc.* 2>/dev/null
/usr/lib64/libodbc.so.2
/usr/lib64/libodbc.so
/usr/lib64/libodbc.so.2.0.0

So, I had to apply a quick and dirty hack:

[openxs@fc23 node2]$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/libodbc.so.2.0.0  /usr/lib64/libodbc.so.1

As a result CONNECT engine worked as expected, as long as proper account and IP-address where used:

MariaDB [test]> INSTALL SONAME 'ha_connect';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.27 sec)

MariaDB [test]> create table r_t2(id int primary key, c1 int) engine=connect table_type=mysql connection='mysql://msandbox:msandbox@127.0.0.1:23532/test/t';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.04 sec)

MariaDB [test]> select * from r_t2;                     

+----+------+
| id | c1   |
+----+------+
|  1 |    2 |
|  2 |    3 |
+----+------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

From configuring MaxScale to work with database having underscore in the name to re-writing Java code that used to work with Oracle RDBMS for MySQL, with many missing details in the manuals and software bugs identified or reported in between, and all that with ongoing studies of performance problems and lost quorums, rolling upgrades and failed SSTs in Galera clusters - this is what support engineers here in MariaDB have to deal with during a typical working week.