May 22, 2013

Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 1

May 16, 2013 By 3 Comments

(This is part one of a two part series) Over the past few weeks I have been looking at a preview release of Virident’s vCache software, which is a kernel module and set of utilities designed to provide functionality similar to that of FlashCache. In particular, Virident engaged Percona to do a usability and feature-set [...]

Filed Under: Benchmarks, Hardware and Storage, MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

More on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization

April 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]

Filed Under: Benchmarks, MySQL Tagged With: ,

The write cache: Swap insanity tome III

April 19, 2013 By 5 Comments

Swapping has always been something bad for MySQL performance but it is even more important for HA systems. It is so important to avoid swapping with HA that NDB cluster basically forbids calling malloc after the startup phase and hence its rather complex configuration. Probably most readers of this blog know (or should know) about [...]

Filed Under: Hardware and Storage, Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: , , ,

10 years of MySQL User Conferences

April 11, 2013 By 6 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: Events and Announcements, Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL, Percona Live Tagged With: , , ,

MySQL 5.6 – InnoDB Memcached Plugin as a caching layer

March 29, 2013 By 10 Comments

A common practice to offload traffic from MySQL 5.6 is to use a caching layer to store expensive result sets or objects.  Some typical use cases include: Complicated query result set (search results, recent users, recent posts, etc) Full page output (relatively static pages) Full objects (user or cart object built from several queries) Infrequently [...]

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MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

March 11, 2013 By 7 Comments

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

Filed Under: MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6: Part 2, The Queries!

March 4, 2013 By 7 Comments

This is part 2 in a 3 part series. In part 1, we took a quick look at some initial configuration of InnoDB full-text search and discovered a little bit of quirky behavior; here, we are going to run some queries and compare the result sets. Our hope is that the one of two things [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 default variable values differences

February 21, 2013 By 8 Comments

As the part of analyzing surprising MySQL 5.5 vs MySQL 5.6 performance results I’ve been looking at changes to default variable values. To do that I’ve loaded the values from MySQL 5.5.30 and MySQL 5.6.10 to the different tables and ran the query:

Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: , , ,

Feature preview: Compact backups in Percona XtraBackup

January 29, 2013 By 11 Comments

We continue to improve Percona XtraBackup, and today I would like to give a preview for one feature which comes in next Percona XtraBackup 2.1 release. This feature is “Compact backups”, and let me explain what it does. As you may know InnoDB PK (Primary Key) contains all data, and all secondary indexes are only [...]

Filed Under: MySQL, Percona Software Tagged With: ,

Is there room for more MySQL IO Optimization?

January 3, 2013 By 11 Comments

I prefer to run MySQL with innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT in most cases – it makes sure there is no overhead of double buffering and I can save the limited amount of file system cache I would normally have on database server for those things which need to be cached — system files, binary log, FRM files, MySQL [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: , ,
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