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Category: Administration

Enterprise-Level Backups in MySQL

Published 2022-12-05 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Vileikis continues a series on backups with MySQL:

MySQL Enterprise Backup is a known tool for everyone inside of the world of MySQL, no matter if people dealing with the tool are enterprise (business) minded or not. The tool can be considered the flagship of MySQL’s enterprise-level offerings: it comes as a part of its Enterprise tier and costs thousands to attain: is it worth your money, and perhaps more importantly, your time? We will figure that out in this blog.

Read on for Lukas’s thoughts.

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Where Extended Events Go by Default

Published 2022-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Zika is curious:

Have you ever wondered where the .xel file is saved when you create a new Extended Event session and don’t specify the full path (just the file name)?

Like so: [image removed because you should go to Tom’s site and see it, ed.]

Well, so did I and here’s what I’ve found out.

Click through to learn where these files end up if you don’t specify anything.

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Just Enough Administration and Granting Access to SQL Server

Published 2022-11-28 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski tries out a tool:

We’ve all been there as DBAs…people requesting access to the servers that we look after to be able to view certain things.

I’ve always got, well, twitchy with giving access to servers tbh…but what if we could completely restrict what users could do via powershell?

Enter Just Enough Administration. With JEA we can grant remote access via powershell sessions to servers and limit what users can do.

Click through to see how it works.

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Backup Options for MySQL

Published 2022-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Vileikis continues a series on backing up MySQL. Part 2 involves Percona XtraBackup:

As already stated above, Percona XtraBackup is one of the primary offerings for MySQL & Percona database administrators developed by Percona. The tool is an open-source backup utility that does not lock our databases during the backup processes it performs. Percona says that their tool can provide automatic verification of backups that have been taken, offer fast dumping and restore times, and above all, it’s supported by their award-winning consulting services helping us make sure that our data and its backups are in safe hands by day and by night.

Part 3 covers mysqlpump:

mysqlpump is a backup utility that is used via the command-line interface. The tool is very similar to mysqldump in that it provides us with the ability to take logical backups, but also different at the same time – the goal of mysqlpump is to be an extendable, parallel-supporting replacement of mysqldump. In their blog from 2015, MySQL team said that one of the primary aims of introducing mysqlpump was not be forced to implement legacy functionality that is provided by mysqldump.

Read on to see how both of these work.

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Tips for Large Table Data Archival

Published 2022-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand follows up on a prior post:

As soon as you realize your growth rates are higher than expected, you need to plan to buy or allocate more disk space. There is no way around this—more data means more disk. You can delay the inevitable for a little bit with better compression, but this is not a long-term fix, and it can impact query performance in different ways (trading CPU for I/O).

Once more disk is in place, you can plan your growth better.

Click through for some guidance on how to plan that growth.

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“The Function Requested Is Not Supported” Errors on Availability Groups

Published 2022-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler troubleshoots an issue:

Checking the logs on the secondary, it was littered with ‘Database Mirroring login attempt failed with error: ‘Connection handshake failed. An OS call failed: (80090302) 0x80090302(The function requested is not supported).’ messages. The primary server wasn’t able to authenticate with the secondary, but why? Everything looked ok as far as I could see.

Click through for the fruits of David’s labor.

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Transaction Log File Autogrowth in SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

William Assaf mentions a welcome change to SQL Server 2022:

Starting with SQL Server 2022, transaction log file growth events up to 64 MB in size can benefit from instant file initialization (IFI). As usual, the transaction log is otherwise unable to benefit from instant file initialization. 

This should be a big performance improvement if your transaction log files unexpectedly grow. Of course, you should try to avoid autogrowth events altogether. 

The prior default of 10% autogrowth has led to so many problems over the years. I’d like new database files (MDF and NDF) to have a similar default as well.

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Thoughts on Page Life Expectancy

Published 2022-11-08 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry shares a few thoughts on Page Life Expectancy:

One of the very misunderstood values that you can monitor in Microsoft SQL Server is Page Life Expectancy (PLE). I’ve read online that many people think that the value of Page Life Expectancy is worthless to monitor. And that really isn’t true. While Page Life Expectancy won’t tell you a specific problem by itself, it can be used to point you in the correct direction so that you know where to look.

There was a backlash against PLE, specifically the “PLE should be at least 300” concept, but Denny throws that away and digs into the actual benefit from observing this metric.

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