In preparing for this month’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, I’ve been reminiscing about the annual MySQL User Conference’s history – the 9 times it previously took place in its various reincarnations – and there are a lot of good things, fun things to remember. 2003 was the year that marked the first MySQL user conference [...]
Understanding the maximum number of columns in a MySQL table
This post was initially going to be two sets of polls: “What is the maximum number of columns in MySQL?” and “What is the minimum maximum number of columns in MySQL?”. Before you read on, ponder those questions and come up with your own answers… and see if you’re right or can prove me wrong! [...]
Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance
MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
Binary log file size matters (sometimes)
I used to think one should never look at max_binlog_size, however last year I had a couple of interesting cases which showed that sometimes it may be very important variable to tune properly. I meant to write about it earlier but never really had a chance to do it. I have it now!
Announcement of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.20 GA release
I am excited to announce the availability of the GA release of our new product Percona XtraDB Cluster. Percona XtraDB Cluster is a High Availability and Scalability solution for MySQL Users and is based on Percona Server 5.5.20. With this release we make clustering very easy and affordable for everyone. You can convert your existing [...]
Faster Point In Time Recovery with LVM2 Snaphots and Binary Logs
LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
Announcement of Percona XtraDB Cluster (alpha release)
I am happy to announce the availability of alpha release of our new product Percona XtraDB Cluster. Percona XtraDB Cluster is High Availability and Scalability solution for MySQL Users and based on Percona Server 5.5.17 Percona XtraDB Cluster provides: Synchronous replication. Transaction either commited on all nodes or none. Multi-master replication. You can write to [...]
An update on Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2012
We announced a while back that we were going to continue the traditional MySQL conference in Santa Clara, because O’Reilly wasn’t doing it anymore. But we haven’t given an update in a while. Here’s the current status: We created a conference committee. We created a conference website that allows people to create an account and [...]
MySQL opening .frm even when table is in table definition cache
or… “the case of Stewart recognizing parameters to the read() system call in strace output”. Last week, a colleague asked a question: I have an instance of MySQL with 100 tables and the table_definition_cache set to 1000. My understanding of this is that MySQL won’t revert to opening the FRM files to read the table [...]
Return of the Query Cache, win a Percona Live ticket
It’s Friday again, and time for another TGIF give-away of a Percona Live London ticket! But first, what’s new with the MySQL query cache? You may know that it still has the same fundamental architecture that it’s always had, and that this can cause scalability problems and locking, but there have been some important changes [...]

