May 25, 2013

The write cache: Swap insanity tome III

Swapping has always been something bad for MySQL performance but it is even more important for HA systems. It is so important to avoid swapping with HA that NDB cluster basically forbids calling malloc after the startup phase and hence its rather complex configuration. Probably most readers of this blog know (or should know) about [...]

Rotating MySQL slow logs safely

This blog post is part two of two. Like part one, published Wednesday, this is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog. Thanks again to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon. And one more reminder that I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo next week in Santa Clara, California so look for me there. You [...]

Is your MySQL buffer pool warm? Make it sweat!

Today’s blog post diving into the waters of the MySQL buffer pool is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog, and is Part 1 of 2. Thank you to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon for contributing to this project and post. We’ll be posting Part 2 on Thursday. I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and [...]

10 years of MySQL User Conferences

In preparing for this month’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, I’ve been reminiscing about the annual MySQL User Conference’s history – the 9 times it previously took place in its various reincarnations – and there are a lot of good things, fun things to remember. 2003 was the year that marked the first MySQL user conference [...]

MySQL 5.6 – InnoDB Memcached Plugin as a caching layer

A common practice to offload traffic from MySQL 5.6 is to use a caching layer to store expensive result sets or objects.  Some typical use cases include: Complicated query result set (search results, recent users, recent posts, etc) Full page output (relatively static pages) Full objects (user or cart object built from several queries) Infrequently [...]

MySQL 5.6 Compatible Percona Toolkit 2.2 Released

A new Percona Toolkit series has been released: Percona Toolkit 2.2 for MySQL 5.6. Several months in the making and many new features, changes, and improvements make this a great new series. It replaces the 2.1 series for which we plan to do only one more bug fix release (as 2.1.10) then retire. 2.2 is [...]

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. [...]

Announcing Percona Server for MySQL 5.5.30-30.1

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.5.30-30.1 on March 7, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.30, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.30-30.1 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of [...]

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

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 [...]