May 21, 2013

Choosing an appropriate benchmark length

The duration of a benchmark is an important factor that helps determine how meaningful it is. Most systems have some “burstable capacity,” and this can influence the results a lot. You can see this in all areas of life — you can sprint much faster than you can run a 10k race. Your stereo system [...]

Is VoltDB really as scalable as they claim?

Before I begin, a disclaimer. VoltDB is not a customer, and did not pay Percona or me to investigate VoltDB’s scalability or publish this blog post. More disclaimers at the end. Short version: VoltDB is very scalable; it should scale to 120 partitions, 39 servers, and 1.6 million complex transactions per second at over 300 [...]

Percona Server and XtraBackup weekly news, February 5th

I decided to try a series of blog posts keeping people informed about what’s happening in Percona Server and Percona XtraBackup once a week. I’ll try to digest things, but it turns out to be hard — I want to provide details and links for everything, but then it isn’t really a digest anymore, so [...]

Percona Live Keynote Speaker: Mark Callaghan

Mark Callaghan has graciously accepted to be the closing keynote speaker for Percona Live: San Francisco! Mark is best known for his work behind MySQL @ Facebook, where he and his team maintain one of the largest MySQL installations around.  They also contribute back to the community with a publicly available branch of enhancements, improved [...]

MySQL Limitations Part 4: One thread per connection

This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in core use cases (links: part 1, 2, 3). This post is about the way MySQL handles connections, allocating one thread per connection to the server.

Percona White Paper: Architecting SaaS Applications with XtraDB

Vadim and I have just published a new technical white paper. It shows how Percona Server with XtraDB can make large-scale multi-tenant databases easier to build with MySQL. Our experiences working with SaaS and shared-hosting companies influenced the features we included in Percona Server and XtraDB, and I think this is the best explanation of [...]

Analyzing the distribution of InnoDB log file writes

I recently did a quick analysis of the distribution of writes to InnoDB’s log files. On a high-traffic commodity MySQL server running Percona XtraDB for a gaming workload (mostly inserts to the “moves” table), I used strace to gather statistics about how the log file writes are distributed in terms of write size. InnoDB writes [...]

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 [...]

Global Transaction ID and other patches available!

I do not know if you noticed it, but Google (Mark Callaghan, Justin Tolmer and their internal mysql-team) made a great contribution to MySQL. Patches global transaction IDs, binlog event checksums and crash-safe replication state are separated and published on Launchpad (https://code.launchpad.net/~jtolmer/mysql-server/global-trx-ids). For me it was a big wall in using these patches that they [...]

Announcing Percona Performance Conference 2009 on April 22 & 23

…any sessions this year; Peter, Vadim, and the rest of us at Percona submitted over a dozen session proposals, which were initially declined. As …Cabral is organizing.

That’s the back story — now on to the Percona Performance Conference! This is not “another MySQL conference.” It’s a performance…to Santa Clara.

We will not be the only ones speaking at Percona Performance Conference; other experts will join us in making presentations too. …to propose a session, please do so through the Percona Performance Conference website.

The Percona team looks forward to greeting you face to face …