I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]
Why do we care about MySQL Performance at High Concurrency?
In many MySQL Benchmarks we can see performance compared with rather high level of concurrency. In some cases reaching 4,000 or more concurrent threads which hammer databases as quickly as possible resulting in hundreds or even thousands concurrently active queries. The question is how common is it in production ? The typical metrics to use [...]
Percona Server on the Raspberry Pi: Your own MySQL Database Server for Under $80
There are many reasons for wanting a small MySQL database server: You’re a uni student who wants to learn the SQL language better and needs a mini-testbox You’re a Windows user who wants to play around with Percona Server on Linux You’re a corporate application developer who wants a small SQL development & test box [...]
Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif
There are times where you need to know exactly how much memory the mysqld server (or any other program) is using, where (i.e. for what function) it was allocated, how it got there (a backtrace, please!), and at what point in time the allocation happened. For example; you may have noticed a sharp memory increase [...]
Serious build and testing automation
Here at Percona we’ve spent a lot of time improving our development and testing practices. Why? Because constant innovation keeps us ahead and more productive. We want to work smarter, not harder. One of the tools we use is the Jenkins Continuous Integration server. We use Jenkins pretty heavily to help with out development processes [...]
Percona and the MariaDB Foundation
There have been several reports (1,2,3) describing Percona’s stance regarding the MariaDB Foundation that are not totally accurate so I though it would be worth it to describe where we stand on this and related matters. First, let me say the creation of theMariaDB Foundation is a good thing for the MariaDB Community and I’m [...]
Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)
I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding. They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]
Realtime stats to pay attention to in Percona XtraDB Cluster and Galera
I learn more and more about Galera every day. As I learn more, I try to keep my myq_gadgets toolkit up to date with what I consider is important to keep any eye on on a PXC node. In that spirit, I just today pushed some changes to the ‘wsrep’ report, and I thought I’d go over [...]
Distro Packages, Pre-built Binaries or Compile Your Own MySQL
I’ve been helping customers deploy and maintain MySQL (and variants) for the last couple of years and it has always been interesting to hear customer thoughts on how they want their servers installed. It has also been asked many times not only by our support and consulting customers, but widely from different forums and blogs [...]
Some fun with R visualization
My previous post I finished with the graph with unstable results. There I won’t analyze causes, but rather I want to show some different ways to present results.

