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 [...]
MySQL Partitioning – can save you or kill you
December 11, 2010 By 44 Comments
I wanted for a while to write about using MySQL Partitioning for Performance Optimization and I just got a relevant customer case to illustrate it. First you need to understand how partitions work internally. Partitions are on the low level are separate table. This means when you’re doing lookup by partitioned key you will look [...]
The perils of uniform hardware and RAID auto-learn cycles
November 16, 2010 By 16 Comments
Last night a customer had an emergency in selected machines on a large cluster of quite uniform database servers. Some of the servers were slowing down in a very puzzling way over a short time span (a couple of hours). Queries were taking multiple seconds to execute instead of being practically instantaneous. But nothing seemed [...]
The Doom of Multiple Storage Engines
May 8, 2010 By 22 Comments
One of the big “Selling Points” of MySQL is support for Multiple Storage engines, and from the glance view it is indeed great to provide users with same top level SQL interface allowing them to store their data many different way. As nice as it sounds the in theory this benefit comes at very significant [...]
Which adaptive should we use?
September 15, 2009 By 14 Comments
As you may know, InnoDB has 2 limits for unflushed modified blocks in the buffer pool. The one is from physical size of the buffer pool. And the another one is oldness of the block which is from the capacity of transaction log files. In the case of heavy updating workload, the modified ages of [...]
When would you use SAN with MySQL ?
March 9, 2009 By 18 Comments
One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?
Faster MySQL failover with SELECT mirroring
February 1, 2009 By 9 Comments
One of my favorite MySQL configurations for high availability is master-master replication, which is just like normal master-slave replication except that you can fail over in both directions. Aside from MySQL Cluster, which is more special-purpose, this is probably the best general-purpose way to get fast failover and a bunch of other benefits (non-blocking ALTER [...]
Sphinx 0.9.8 is released just in time for OSCON 2008
July 20, 2008 By 2 Comments
As you probably already seen in a post by Baron, Sphinx Release 0.9.8 is finally out, just in time for OSCON 2008. Even though it is “minor release” if you look at the number, it is major release in practice (and you can view snapshots as minor releases). The changes since 0.9.7 are dramatic with [...]
MySQL Replication vs DRBD Battles
April 28, 2008 By 12 Comments
Well these days we see a lot of post for and against (more, more) using of MySQL and DRBD as a high availability practice. I personally think DRBD has its place but there are far more cases when other techniques would work much better for variety of reasons. First let me start with Florian’s comments [...]
Using MMM to ALTER huge tables
March 27, 2008 By 11 Comments
Few months ago, I wrote about a faster way to do certain table modifications online. It works well when all you want is to remove auto_increment or change ENUM values. When it comes to changes that really require table to be rebuilt – adding/dropping columns or indexes, changing data type, converting data to different character [...]
