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 [...]
Using Flexviews – part one, introduction to materialized views
If you know me, then you probably have heard of Flexviews. If not, then it might not be familiar to you. I’m giving a talk on it at the MySQL 2011 CE, and I figured I should blog about it before then. For those unfamiliar, Flexviews enables you to create and maintain incrementally refreshable materialized [...]
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 [...]
Impact of the sort buffer size in MySQL
The parameter sort_buffer_size is one the MySQL parameters that is far from obvious to adjust. It is a per session buffer that is allocated every time it is needed. The problem with the sort buffer comes from the way Linux allocates memory. Monty Taylor (here) have described the underlying issue in detail, but basically above [...]
When should you store serialized objects in the database?
A while back Friendfeed posted a blog post explaining how they changed from storing data in MySQL columns to serializing data and just storing it inside TEXT/BLOB columns. It seems that since then, the technique has gotten more popular with Ruby gems now around to do this for you automatically.
Converting Character Sets
The web is going the way of utf8. Drizzle has chosen it as the default character set, most back-ends to websites use it to store text data, and those who are still using latin1 have begun to migrate their databases to utf8. Googling for “mysql convert charset to utf8″ results in a plethora of sites, [...]
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]
ANALYZE: MyISAM vs Innodb
Following up on my Previous Post I decided to do little test to see how accurate stats we can get for for Index Stats created by ANALYZE TABLE for MyISAM and Innodb. But before we go into that I wanted to highlight about using ANALYZE TABLE in production as some people seems to be thinking [...]
Picking datatype for STATUS fields
Quite commonly in the applications you would need to use some kind of “status” field – status of order – “new”, “confirmed”, “in production”, “shipped” status of job, message etc. People use variety of ways to handle them often without giving enough thought to the choice which can cause problems later. Perhaps worst, though quite [...]
Using MMM to ALTER huge tables
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 [...]

