As an instructor with Percona I’m sometimes asked about the differences between the READ COMMITTED and REPEATABLE READ transaction isolation levels. There are a few differences between READ-COMMITTED and REPEATABLE-READ, and they are all related to locking.
Differences between READ-COMMITTED and REPEATABLE-READ transaction isolation levels
Hidden columns of query_review_history table
You can use pt-query-digest to process a MySQL slow query log and store historical values for review trend analysis into query_review_history table. According to its official documentation you can populate many columns in that table but there are other important ones such as ‘user’, ‘host’, ‘db’ which are not included by default. I will explain [...]
Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup
I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions. Here are their questions and my [...]
Announcing Percona Server 5.5.27-28.0
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.27-28.0 on August 23rd, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.27, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.27-28.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]
MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup
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 [...]
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 [...]
pt-online-schema-change and default values
When I’m doing conventional ALTER TABLE in MySQL I can ignore default value and it will be assigned based on the column type. For example this alter table sbtest add column v varchar(100) not null would work even though we do not specify default value. MySQL will assign empty string as default default value for [...]
Find and remove duplicate indexes
Having duplicate keys in our schemas can hurt the performance of our database: They make the optimizer phase slower because MySQL needs to examine more query plans. The storage engine needs to maintain, calculate and update more index statistics DML and even read queries can be slower because MySQL needs update fetch more data to [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
Announcing Percona Server 5.5.24-26.0
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.24-26.0 on June 1st, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.24, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.24-26.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]

