I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]
How FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK works with Innodb Tables
Many backup tools including Percona Xtrabackup, MyLVMBackup and others use FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK to temporary make MySQL read only. In many cases the period for which server has to be made read only is very short, just few seconds, yet the impact of FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK can be quite large because [...]
How to recover a single InnoDB table from a Full Backup
Sometimes we need to restore only some tables from a full backup maybe because your data loss affect a small number of your tables. In this particular scenario is faster to recover single tables than a full backup. This is easy with MyISAM but if your tables are InnoDB the process is a little bit [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks
In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]
A recovery trivia or how to recover from a lost ibdata1 file
A few day ago, a customer came to Percona needing to recover data. Basically, while doing a transfer from one SAN to another, something went wrong and they lost the ibdata1 file, where all the table meta-data is stored. Fortunately, they were running with innodb_file_per_table so the data itself was available. What they could provide [...]
What’s up with HandlerSocket?
I’ve presented at two different venues about HandlerSocket recently and the number one question that always arises is: Why hasn’t HandlerSocket become more popular than it is? Considering how fast and awesome HandlerSocket is, it’s not seeing as rapid adoption as some might expect. I theorize that there are five reasons for this:
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]
High Rate insertion with MySQL and Innodb
I again work with the system which needs high insertion rate for data which generally fits in memory. Last time I worked with similar system it used MyISAM and the system was built using multiple tables. Using multiple key caches was the good solution at that time and we could get over 200K of inserts/sec. [...]
How many partitions can you have ?
I had an interesting case recently. The customer dealing with large MySQL data warehouse had the table which was had data merged into it with INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements. The performance was extremely slow. I turned out it is caused by hundreds of daily partitions created for this table. What is the most [...]
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 [...]

