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 [...]
Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.1.1 GA
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.1 on May 15th 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories. Percona XtraBackup enables backups without blocking user queries, making it ideal for companies with large data sets and mission-critical applications that cannot tolerate long periods of downtime. Offered [...]
MySQL and Percona Server in LinkBench benchmark
Around month ago Facebook has announced the Linkbench benchmark that models the social graph OLTP workload. Sources, along with a very nice description of how to setup and run this benchmark, can be found here. We decided to run this benchmark for MySQL Server 5.5.30, 5.6.11 and Percona Server 5.5.30 and check how these servers [...]
Percona XtraBackup 2.1.0 ‘release candidate’ for MySQL available for download
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.0-rc1 on May 7, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here. For this RC release, we will not be making APT and YUM repositories available, just base deb and RPM packages This is an Release Candidate quality release and is not intended for [...]
Benchmarking Percona Server TokuDB vs InnoDB
After compiling Percona Server with TokuDB, of course I wanted to compare InnoDB performance vs TokuDB. I have a particular workload I’m interested in testing – it is an insert-intensive workload (which is TokuDB’s strong suit) with some roll-up aggregation, which should produce updates in-place (I will use INSERT .. ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements [...]
Percona XtraBackup 2.0.7 for MySQL available for download
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0.7 for MySQL on May 6, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories. Percona XtraBackup is the world’s only open-source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking backups for InnoDB and XtraDB databases. This release is the current GA (Generally Available) [...]
Follow these basics when migrating to Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL
Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these [...]
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 [...]

