As an instructor with Percona I’m sometimes asked about the differences between the READ COMMITTED and REPEATABLE READ transaction isolation levels. There are a few differences between READ-COMMITTED and REPEATABLE-READ, and they are all related to locking.
Differences between READ-COMMITTED and REPEATABLE-READ transaction isolation levels
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Multi-node writing and Unexpected deadlocks
Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and the technology it uses (Galera) is an exciting alternative to traditional MySQL replication. For those who don’t know, it gives you: Fully Synchronous replication with a write latency increase equivalent to a ping RTT to the furthest node Automatic cluster synchronization, both incremental and full restores The ability to read [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
InnoDB’s gap locks
One of the most important features of InnoDB is the row level locking. This feature provides better concurrency under heavy write load but needs additional precautions to avoid phantom reads and to get a consistent Statement based replication. To accomplish that, row level locking databases also acquire gap locks. What is a Phantom Read A [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster Feature 2: Multi-Master replication
This is about the second great feature – Multi-Master replication, what you get with Percona XtraDB Cluster. It is recommended you get familiar with general architecture of the cluster, described on the previous post. By Multi-Master I mean the ability to write to any node in your cluster and do not worry that eventually you [...]
Statement based replication with Stored Functions, Triggers and Events
Statement based replication writes the queries that modify data in the Binary Log to replicate them on the slave or to use it as a PITR recovery. Here we will see what is the behavior of the MySQL when it needs to log “not usual” queries like Events, Functions, Stored Procedures, Local Variables, etc. We’ll [...]
Avoiding auto-increment holes on InnoDB with INSERT IGNORE
Are you using InnoDB tables on MySQL version 5.1.22 or newer? If so, you probably have gaps in your auto-increment columns. A simple INSERT IGNORE query creates gaps for every ignored insert, but this is undocumented behaviour. This documentation bug is already submitted. Firstly, we will start with a simple question. Why do we have [...]
InnoDB Flushing: Theory and solutions
I mentioned problems with InnoDB flushing in a previous post. Before getting to ideas on a solution, let’s define some terms and take a look into theory. The two most important parameters for InnoDB performance are innodb_buffer_pool_size and innodb_log_file_size. InnoDB works with data in memory, and all changes to data are performed in memory. In [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
Innodb performance gotcha w Larger queries.
Couple of days ago I was looking for a way to improve update performance for the application and I was replacing single value UPDATE with multiple value REPLACE (though I also saw the same problem with INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE) As I went from 1 value to 3 or 10 in the batch performance [...]

