May 22, 2013

MySQL performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS

A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts [...]

Shard-Query EC2 images available

Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]

Percona XtraBackup 1.6

Percona XtraBackup 1.6 is now available for download and is the current stable release version of XtraBackup.

Innodb row size limitation

I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.

Choosing an appropriate benchmark length

The duration of a benchmark is an important factor that helps determine how meaningful it is. Most systems have some “burstable capacity,” and this can influence the results a lot. You can see this in all areas of life — you can sprint much faster than you can run a 10k race. Your stereo system [...]

Death match! EBS versus SSD price, performance, and QoS

Is it a good idea to deploy your database into the cloud? It depends. I have seen it work well many times, and cause trouble at other times. In this blog post I want to examine cloud-based I/O. I/O matters a lot when a) the database’s working set is bigger than the server’s memory, or [...]

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 [...]

Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep

Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]

UDF -vs- MySQL Stored Function

Few days ago I was working on a case where we needed to modify a lot of data before pushing it to sphinx – MySQL did not have a function to do the thing so I thought I’ll write MySQL Stored Function and we’ll be good to go. It worked! But not so well really [...]

FlashCache: first experiments

I wrote about FlashCache there, and since that I run couple benchmarks, to see what performance benefits we can expect. For initial tries I took sysbench oltp tests ( read-only and read-write) and case when data fully fits into L2 cache. I made binaries for FlashCache for CentOS 5.4, kernel 2.6.18-164.15, you can download it [...]