May 25, 2013

btrfs – probably not ready yet

Every time I have a conversation on SSD, someone mentions btrfs filesystem. And usually it is colored as a solution that will solve all our problems, improve overall performance and SSD in particular, and it is a saviour. Of course it caught my curiosity and I decided to perform a benchmark similar to what I [...]

Announcement of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.20 GA release

I am excited to announce the availability of the GA release of our new product Percona XtraDB Cluster. Percona XtraDB Cluster is a High Availability and Scalability solution for MySQL Users and is based on Percona Server 5.5.20. With this release we make clustering very easy and affordable for everyone. You can convert your existing [...]

MariaDB 5.3 is released as GA!

Congratulations to Monty Program and the many community contributors for releasing the GA version of MariaDB 5.3. We were in our annual all-staff meeting last week, so we are a little slow to blog about this and acknowledge the great work that has gone into MariaDB. Better late than never, I hope. Before I discuss [...]

Announcement of Percona XtraDB Cluster (alpha release)

I am happy to announce the availability of alpha release of our new product Percona XtraDB Cluster. Percona XtraDB Cluster is High Availability and Scalability solution for MySQL Users and based on Percona Server 5.5.17 Percona XtraDB Cluster provides: Synchronous replication. Transaction either commited on all nodes or none. Multi-master replication. You can write to [...]

Which Linux distribution for a MySQL database server? A specific point of view.

One of the more common questions I get asked is which Linux distribution I would use for a MySQL database server. Bearing the responsibility for someone else’s success means I should advise something that is stable, reliable, easy to manage and has plenty of resources available online. It should also allow running MySQL without too [...]

Review of Virident FlashMAX MLC cards

I have been following Virident for a long time (e.g. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/06/15/virident-tachion-new-player-on-flash-pci-e-cards-market/). They have great PCIe Flash cards based on SLC NAND. I always thought that Virident needed to come up with an MLC card, and I am happy to see they have finally done so. At Virident’s request, I performed an evaluation of their MLC [...]

Disaster: MySQL 5.5 Flushing

We raised topic of problems with flushing in InnoDB several times, some links: InnoDB Flushing theory and solutions MySQL 5.5.8 in search of stability This was not often recurring problem so far, however in my recent experiments, I observe it in very simple sysbench workload on hardware which can be considered as typical nowadays.

Shard-Query turbo charges Infobright community edition (ICE)

Shard-Query is an open source tool kit which helps improve the performance of queries against a MySQL database by distributing the work over multiple machines and/or multiple cores. This is similar to the divide and conquer approach that Hive takes in combination with Hadoop. Shard-Query applies a clever approach to parallelism which allows it to [...]

InnoDB page sizes: plans and ideas

It is well known fact that InnoDB standard page size is 16K or 16384 bytes. Sometime ago we added feature to Percona Server to change that to 4K or 8K (innodb_page_size). That maybe useful for SSD that operates with 4K blocks and you can get really much better throughput with 4K ( however we need [...]

Percona welcomes Alexey Kopytov

Percona is pleased to extend a belated welcome to Alexey Kopytov. He actually joined us back in November, 2010, but we somehow overlooked blogging then about his switch from Oracle to Percona. Alexey has over six years of work deep in MySQL source code as part of MySQL AB, then Sun, and later Oracle. His [...]