May 21, 2013

Galera Flow Control in Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL

Last week at Percona Live, I delivered a six-hour tutorial about Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL.  I actually had more material than I covered (by design), but one thing I regret we didn’t cover was Flow control.  So, I thought I’d write a post covering flow control because it is important to understand. What [...]

Innodb Caching (part 2)

Few weeks ago I wrote about Innodb Caching with main idea you might need more cache when you think you are because Innodb caches data in pages, not rows, and so the whole page needs to be in memory even if you need only one row from it. I have created the simple benchmark which [...]

MySQL caching methods and tips

“The least expensive query is the query you never run.” Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding [...]

Modeling MySQL Capacity by Measuring Resource Consumptions

There are many angles you can look at the system to predict in performance, the model baron has published for example is good for measuring scalability of the system as concurrency growths. In many cases however we’re facing a need to answer a question how much load a given system can handle when load is [...]

Shard-Query adds parallelism to queries

Preamble: On performance, workload and scalability: MySQL has always been focused on OLTP workloads. In fact, both Percona Server and MySQL 5.5.7rc have numerous performance improvements which benefit workloads that have high concurrency. Typical OLTP workloads feature numerous clients (perhaps hundreds or thousands) each reading and writing small chunks of data. The recent improvements to [...]

Scaling: Consider both Size and Load

So lets imagine you have the server handling 100.000 user accounts. You can see the CPU,IO and Network usage is below 10% of capacity – does it mean you can count on server being able to handle 1.000.000 of accounts ? Not really, and there are few reasons why, I’ll name most important of them: [...]

How many partitions can you have ?

I had an interesting case recently. The customer dealing with large MySQL data warehouse had the table which was had data merged into it with INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements. The performance was extremely slow. I turned out it is caused by hundreds of daily partitions created for this table. What is the most [...]

MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 1

All to often people force themselves into using a database like MySQL with no thought into whether if its the best solution to there problem. Why?  Because their other applications use it, so why not the new application?  Over the past couple of months I have been doing a ton of work for clients who [...]

Just do the math!

One of the most typical reasons for performance and scalability problems I encounter is simply failing to do the math. And these are typically bad one because it often leads to implementing architectures which are not up for job they are intended to solve. Let me start with example to make it clear. Lets say [...]

When would you use SAN with MySQL ?

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 ?