May 20, 2013

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 [...]

Spreading .ibd files across multiple disks; the optimization that isn’t

Inspired by Baron’s earlier post, here is one I hear quite frequently – “If you enable innodb_file_per_table, each table is it’s own .ibd file.  You can then relocate the heavy hit tables to a different location and create symlinks to the original location.” There are a few things wrong with this advice:

The perils of uniform hardware and RAID auto-learn cycles

Last night a customer had an emergency in selected machines on a large cluster of quite uniform database servers. Some of the servers were slowing down in a very puzzling way over a short time span (a couple of hours). Queries were taking multiple seconds to execute instead of being practically instantaneous. But nothing seemed [...]

Estimating Replication Capacity

It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to optimize your system when your replication runs [...]

XtraDB: The Top 10 enhancements

Note: This post is part 2 of 4 on building our training workshop. Last week I talked about why you don’t want to shard. This week I’m following up with the top 10 enhancements that XtraDB has over the built-in InnoDB included in MySQL 5.0 and 5.1.  Building this list was not really a scientific [...]

EC2/EBS single and RAID volumes IO benchmark

During preparation of Percona-XtraDB template to run in RightScale environment, I noticed that IO performance on EBS volume in EC2 cloud is not quite perfect. So I have spent some time benchmarking volumes. Interesting part with EBS volumes is that you see it as device in your OS, so you can easily make software RAID [...]

MySQL QA Team Benchmarks for MySQL 5.1.30

As you might have seen MySQL QA Team has published their benchmarks for MySQL 5.0.72 and 5.1.30. It is interesting to compare with results I posted previously

Thoughs on Innodb Incremental Backups

For normal Innodb “hot” backups we use LVM or other snapshot based technologies with pretty good success. However having incremental backups remain the problem. First why do you need incremental backups at all ? Why not just take the full backups daily. The answer is space – if you want to keep several generations to [...]

Living with backups

Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]

Estimating Undo Space needed for LVM Snapshot

We know MySQL Backups using LVM are pretty cool (check out mylvmbackup) or MMM though it is quite typical LVM is not configurable properly to be usable for MySQL Backups. Quite frequently I find LVM installed on the system but no free space left to be used as snapshot undo space, which means LVM is [...]