The announcement of Percona XtraDB Cluster seems to have generated a fair bit of interest : ) Although the documentation contains more formal instructions for setting up a test cluster, I wanted to share a quick way to set up an ad-hoc cluster on a single machine to help people play with this (imho) rather [...]
Statement based replication with Stored Functions, Triggers and Events
Statement based replication writes the queries that modify data in the Binary Log to replicate them on the slave or to use it as a PITR recovery. Here we will see what is the behavior of the MySQL when it needs to log “not usual” queries like Events, Functions, Stored Procedures, Local Variables, etc. We’ll [...]
Avoiding auto-increment holes on InnoDB with INSERT IGNORE
Are you using InnoDB tables on MySQL version 5.1.22 or newer? If so, you probably have gaps in your auto-increment columns. A simple INSERT IGNORE query creates gaps for every ignored insert, but this is undocumented behaviour. This documentation bug is already submitted. Firstly, we will start with a simple question. Why do we have [...]
Improved InnoDB fast index creation
One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER TABLE [...]
Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0 on October 15, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.59, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all the [...]
Percona Server 5.5.16-22.0
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.16-22.0 on October 14, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.16, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.16-22.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all the [...]
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 [...]
Thinking about running OPTIMIZE on your Innodb Table ? Stop!
Innodb/XtraDB tables do benefit from being reorganized often. You can get data physically laid out in primary key order as well as get better feel for primary key and index pages and so using less space, it is just OPTIMIZE TABLE might not be best way to do it. If you’re running Innodb Plugin on [...]
Extending Index for Innodb tables can hurt performance in a surprising way
One schema optimization we often do is extending index when there are queries which can use more key part. Typically this is safe operation, unless index length increases dramatically queries which can use index can also use prefix of the new index are they ? It turns there are special cases when this is not [...]
Joining on range? Wrong!
The problem I am going to describe is likely to be around since the very beginning of MySQL, however unless you carefully analyse and profile your queries, it might easily go unnoticed. I used it as one of the examples in our talk given at phpDay.it conference last week to demonstrate some pitfalls one may [...]

