May 22, 2013

Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013: It feels like 2007 again

I actually don’t remember exactly whether it was in 2006, 2007 or 2008 — but around that time the MySQL community had one of the greatest MySQL conferences put on by O’Reilly and MySQL. It was a good, stable, predictable time. Shortly thereafter, the MySQL world saw acquisitions, forks, times of uncertainly, more acquisitions, more forks, [...]

SimCity outages, traffic control and Thread Pool for MySQL

For this post I’m going to shamelessly exploit the litany of technical problems SimCity players encountered earlier this month and a few examples of how Thread Pool for MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL can help to prevent such incidents. Users of SimCity, a city-building and urban planning simulation video game, encountered network outages, issues with [...]

MySQL Backup tools used by Percona Remote DBA for MySQL

As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic [...]

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

MySQL performance: Impact of memory allocators (Part 2)

Last time I wrote about memory allocators and how they can affect MySQL performance in general. This time I would like to explore this topic from a bit different angle: What impact does the number of processor cores have on different memory allocators and what difference we will see in MySQL performance in this scenario? [...]

Join me for ‘MySQL 5.6: Advantages in a Nutshell.’ Webinar. March 6 at 10 a.m. PST

This Wednesday (March 6 at 10 a.m. PST) I’ll be presenting a webinar titled “MySQL 5.6: Advantages in a Nutshell.” In this presentation, I will provide a brief overview of the advantages MySQL 5.6 offers. My focus is a practical one – to identify the conditions in which one or another feature can be successfully [...]

Percona Server on the Nexus 7: Your own MySQL Database Server on an Android Tablet

Following Roel’s post, Percona Server on the Raspberry Pi: Your own MySQL Database Server , I thought what other crazy gadget can I run Percona Server on? And having an Asus Nexus 7 Android tablet I decided to give it a try. Anything below contains a risk that you break your tablet if you do [...]

Analyzing Slow Query Table in MySQL 5.6

Next week I’m teaching an online Percona Training class, called Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit.  This is a guided tour of best practices for pt-query-digest, the best tool for evaluating where your database response time is being spent. This month we saw the GA release of MySQL 5.6, and I wanted to check if any [...]

Adventures in archiving

One of our Remote DBA service clients recently had an issue with size on disk for a particular table; in short this table was some 25 million rows of application audit data with an on disk size of 345GB recorded solely for the purposes of debugging which may or may not occur. Faced with the task of [...]

How to create/restore a slave using GTID replication in MySQL 5.6

MySQL 5.6 is GA! Now we have new things to play with and in my personal opinion the most interesting one is the new Global Transaction ID (GTID) support in replication. This post is not an explanation of what is GTID and how it works internally because there are many documents about that: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/replication-gtids-concepts.html One [...]