I recently had to do some customer work involving the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin and would like to share my experience in this post. Auditing user activity in MySQL has traditionally been challenging. Most data can be obtained from the slow or general log, but this involves a lot of data you don’t need too, and [...]
Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 2
This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]
Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 1
(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 [...]
Open Source, the MySQL market (and TokuDB in particular)
I was reviewing the Percona Live sponsors list the other day and pondering the potential success stories associated with this product or that one…. and as I was preparing to put more thought on the topic, a PlanetMySQL post caught my eye. It was penned by Mike Hogan and titled, “Thoughts on Xeround and Free!” [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.2.2 released; bug fixes include pt-heartbeat & pt-archiver
During the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 the week before last, we quietly released Percona Toolkit 2.2.2 with a few bug fixes: pt-archiver –bulk-insert may corrupt data pt-heartbeat –utc –check always returns 0 pt-query-digest 2.2 prints unwanted debug info on tcpdump parsing errors pt-query-digest 2.2 prints too many string values Some tools don’t [...]
Percona Live MySQL Conference 2013 wrap-up
The Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 was April 22-25 in Santa Clara, California. This was Percona’s second year organizing the conference and we were very pleased with the event and the feedback (check the #perconalive hashtag for a sampling of the great comments such as this from Tom Krouper or this from John [...]
More on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization
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 [...]
Finally. How to verify if all MySQL records were recovered
After nearly every recovery case the same question arises: How many MySQL records were recovered and how many were lost. Until now there was no way to answer the question without manual investigation. As it turned out a small change can make a big difference. There are two ways to know how many records an [...]
Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 rerelease fixes non-restart issue
In our last 5.5 series release of Percona Server, we included a regression in the RPM packaging that prevented the server from restarting following an upgrade — instead, the server would remain stopped after the upgrade was completed regardless of its state before updating. This caused some problems for some users, especially if automatic upgrading was configured [...]
High-load problems? Investigate them with ‘pt-query-digest’
I had the chance to work on an interesting case last week, and I thought I’d share what I think is a little known goodie from Percona Toolkit for MySQL called pt-query-digest. One customer was suffering from periods of high load on their database server, leading to degraded application performance, and sometimes even short moments [...]

