May 22, 2013

7 Reasons why MySQL Quality will never be the same

I had a call with Monty the other day and I told him why I think MySQL Server Quality will never be the same again. I’ve been thinking a bit more about it and here is the extended list. In particular I think MySQL Server will never be able to reach its original quality guidelines [...]

Using Multiple Key Caches for MyISAM Scalability

I have written before – MyISAM Does Not Scale, or it does quite well – two main things stopping you is table locks and global mutex on the KeyCache. Table Locks are not the issue for Read Only workload and write intensive workloads can be dealt with by using with many tables but Key Cache [...]

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 [...]

Why audit logging with triggers in MySQL is bad for replication

Recently I was tasked with investigating slippage between master and slave in a standard replication setup. The client was using Maatkit’s mk-table-checksum to check his slave data was indeed a fair copy of that of the master.

Fighting MySQL Replication Lag

The problem of MySQL Replication unable to catch up is quite common in MySQL world and in fact I already wrote about it. There are many aspects of managing mysql replication lag such as using proper hardware and configuring it properly. In this post I will just look at couple of query design mistakes which [...]

Recovery beyond data restore

Quite frequently I see customers looking at recovery as on ability to restore data from backup which can be far from being enough to restore the whole system to operating state, especially for complex systems. Instead of looking just at data restore process you better look at the whole process which is required to bring [...]

Recovering Innodb table Corruption

Assume you’re running MySQL with Innodb tables and you’ve got crappy hardware, driver bug, kernel bug, unlucky power failure or some rare MySQL bug and some pages in Innodb tablespace got corrupted. In such cases Innodb will typically print something like this: InnoDB: Database page corruption on disk or a failed InnoDB: file read of [...]

MySQL Replication vs DRBD Battles

Well these days we see a lot of post for and against (more, more) using of MySQL and DRBD as a high availability practice. I personally think DRBD has its place but there are far more cases when other techniques would work much better for variety of reasons. First let me start with Florian’s comments [...]

MySQL extensions for hosting

A few weeks ago I was asked to isolate some functionalities from Mark Callaghan’s MySQL patch bundle. They were extensions adding per-user and per-table accounting to the database, accessible with a new set of commands such as SHOW TABLE_STATISTICS, SHOW INDEX_STATISTICS and SHOW USER_STATISTICS. The first two can interest anyone to periodically check what data [...]

MySQL File System Fragmentation Benchmarks

Few days ago I wrote about testing writing to many files and seeing how this affects sequential read performance. I was very interested to see how it shows itself with real tables so I’ve got the script and ran tests for MyISAM and Innodb tables on ext3 filesystem. Here is what I found: