Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these [...]
Percona Toolkit by example – pt-stalk
pt-stalk recipes: Gather forensic data about MySQL when a server problem occurs It happens to us all from time to time: a server issue arises that leaves you scratching your head. That’s when Percona Toolkit’s pt-stalk comes into play, helping you diagnose the problem by capturing diagnostic data that helps you pinpoint what’s causing the [...]
Helgrinding MySQL with InnoDB for Synchronisation Errors, Fun and Profit
It is no secret that bugs related to multithreading–deadlocks, data races, starvations etc–have a big impact on application’s stability and are at the same time hard to find due to their nondeterministic nature. Any tool that makes finding such bugs easier, preferably before anybody is aware of their existence, is very welcome.
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 [...]
The two even more fundamental performance metrics
In a recent blog post, I wrote about four fundamental metrics for system performance analysis. These are throughput, residence time, “weighted time” (the sum of all residence times in the observation period — the terminology is mine for lack of a better name), and concurrency. I derived all of these metrics from two “even more [...]
InnoDB memory allocation, ulimit, and OpenSUSE
I recently encountered an interesting case. A customer reported that mysqld crashed on start on OpenSUSE 11.2 kernel 2.6.31.12-0.2-desktop x86_64 Â with 96 GB RAM when the innodb_buffer_pool_size was set to anything more than 62 GB. I decided to try it with 76 GB. The error message was an assert due to a failed malloc() [...]
A micro-benchmark of stored routines in MySQL
Ever wondered how fast stored routines are in MySQL? I just ran a quick micro-benchmark to compare the speed of a stored function against a “roughly equivalent” subquery. The idea — and there may be shortcomings that are poisoning the results here, your comments welcome — is to see how fast the SQL procedure code [...]
Another ingenious piece of Sun Marketing
So a while ago I wrote about fun post about MySQL Scalability to 256 way…. Besides discussion on the thread itself I had a lot of private comments in my mail from Sun/MySQL employees which tended to agree with me on this being the a large stretch.
Conference for MySQL Users
If you’re following PlanetMySQL you’ve already seen Baron’s post about MySQL Conference which many of us just have returned from. It was great event as well as 5 conferences I’ve been before that, though however it more and more becomes MySQL marketing channel and business event rather than Users Conference as it originated. This Year [...]
MySQL Query Cache WhiteSpace and comments
Commenting on my previous post on MySQL Query Cache Gerry pokes me as I’m all wrong and both comments and whitespace are fixed in MySQL 5.0. This was not what I remember seeing in production so I decided to do some tests on the matter:

