This is a continuation of my series of benchmark posts comparing Amazon RDS to a server running on Amazon EC2. Upcoming posts (probably 6 or 8 in total) will extend the scope of the benchmark to include data on our Dell r900 with traditional hard drives in RAID10, and a server in the Joyent cloud. [...]
MySQL on Amazon RDS part 1: insert performance
Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) is a cloud-hosted MySQL solution. I’ve had some clients hitting performance limitations on standard EC2 servers with EBS volumes (see SSD versus EBS death match), and one of them wanted to evaluate RDS as a replacement. It is built on the same technologies, but the hardware and networking are supposed [...]
Upgrading MySQL
Upgrading MySQL Server is a very interesting task as you can approach it with so much different “depth”. For some this is 15 minutes job for others it is many month projects. Why is that ? Performing MySQL upgrade two things should normally worry you. It is Regressions – functionality regressions when what you’ve been [...]
Why MySQL’s binlog-do-db option is dangerous
I see a lot of people filtering replication with binlog-do-db, binlog-ignore-db, replicate-do-db, and replicate-ignore-db. Although there are uses for these, they are dangerous and in my opinion, they are overused. For many cases, there’s a safer alternative.
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
Sphinx 0.9.8 is released just in time for OSCON 2008
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 [...]
SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through
Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]
MySQL Sizing questions
I frequently get questions along the lines of “how many transactions per second MySQL can do” or “how many servers I need to handle 100.000 users” or “which hardware would be enough to handle my 40GB” database. There are two things which are very interesting about these questions which make them funny and annoying at [...]

