May 19, 2013

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 [...]

trx descriptors: MySQL performance improvements in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2

One major problem in terms of MySQL performance that still stands in the way of InnoDB scalability is the trx_list scan on consistent read view creation. It was originally reported as a part of MySQL bug #49169 and can be described as follows. Whenever a connection wants to create a consistent read, it has to [...]

Understanding the maximum number of columns in a MySQL table

This post was initially going to be two sets of polls: “What is the maximum number of columns in MySQL?” and “What is the minimum maximum number of columns in MySQL?”. Before you read on, ponder those questions and come up with your own answers… and see if you’re right or can prove me wrong! [...]

MySQL 5.6.10 Optimizer Limitations: Index Condition Pushdown

While preparing the webinar I will deliver this Friday, I ran into a quite interesting (although not very impacting) optimizer issue: a “SELECT *” taking half the time to execute than the same “SELECT one_indexed_column” query in MySQL 5.6.10. This turned into a really nice exercise for checking the performance and inner workings of one [...]

How does MySQL Replication really work?

While we do have many blog posts on replication on our blog, such as on replication being single-threaded, on semi-synchronous replication or on estimating replication capacity, I don’t think we have one that covers the very basics of how MySQL replication really works on the high level. Or it’s been so long ago I can’t [...]

Percona XtraDB Cluster – installation and setup webinar follow up Q&A

Thanks for all, who attended my webinar, I got many questions and I wanted to take this opportunity to answer them. Q: Even ntp has a delay of 0.3-0.4 between servers does that mean a 0.25 as from logs can be an issue ? A: My demo vms were running for a few hours before [...]

Tools and Techniques for Index Design Webinar Questions Followup

I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of Tools and Techniques for Index Design. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. I’d like to invite folks who are interested in tools for query optimization to attend the new Percona [...]

Find unused indexes

I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]

Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo Was A Great Event

Thanks to all of our sponsors, speakers, speaker selection committee, event staff, and especially the attendees for making last week’s conference a resounding success. With over a thousand people, the event made a good comeback after last year’s event, but more importantly, the mood was strongly optimistic. I think a lot of people arrived with [...]

Percona Toolkit 2.1 with New Online Schema Change Tool

I’m proud to announce the GA release of version 2.1 of Percona Toolkit. Percona Toolkit is the essential suite of administrative tools for MySQL. With this release we introduce a new version of pt-online-schema-change, a tool that enables you to ALTER large tables with no blocking or downtime. As you know, MySQL locks tables for [...]