The Percona version of MySQL has been such a good replacement for the generic MySQL version that many of the features and options that existed in Percona have been merged into the generic MySQL.

Innodb_fast_checksum was an option added to improve the performance of checksums.

The system variable was replaced by innodb_checksum_algorithm in 5.6.

Unfortunately, when you go to upgrade from Percona 5.x to Percona (or generic mysql) 5.6, an in-place upgrade will fail.

The error(s) will be generally mysql complaining it can’t read the file. This is because fast checksums can’t be read by the 5.6 version.

Example errors:

InnoDB: checksum mismatch in data file
InnoDB: Could not open

The recommended option is do the default upgrade process: use mysqldump to dump your data out and reload after you replace the binaries.

For large datasets or servers suffering poor IO performance, the time it takes to do that, even using a parallel dump and load tool is prohibitive.

So are you looking for a workaround?

How about a mysql tool which has been around for a while, called innochecksum.

This tool can check your datafiles to make sure the checksums are correct, or in our case, force the checksums to be written a specific way. I was thinking, prep work is done, now it is just process work. But alas, the versions of innochecksum for 5.5 and 5.6 don’t support files sizes over 2Gigabytes.

Luckily, innochecksum for 5.7 actually does support larger file sizes and best of all it works on old version datafiles too. For people hitting this article in the future, 5.7 at the time was just a RC (Release candidate).

To use this method:

1. Backup your db or have good backups.
2. Organize downtime for your db (slave preferably so you aren’t affecting traffic)
3. Shutdown mysql
4. Repeat for each innodb datafile: example command: innochecksum -vS –no-check –write=innodb <path to innodb datafile>
5. Replace innodb_fast_checksum = 1 with innodb_fast_checksum = 0 in your my.cnf (and chef/puppet/ansible repo)
6. Restart mysql

I will cover the whole procedure for upgrading from Percona MySQL 5.5 to Percona MySQL 5.6 in more detail in a later post.

Fun tool tip:

I have had to compile the MySQL 5.7 innochecksum for an older linux kernel running glibc older than 2.14, and it works fine as well. The biggest headache was sorting out cmake, boost etc to enable the compilation of the MySQL 5.7 source code.

Have Fun