Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]
DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL
Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.0.0 GA
I’m really excited to today announce the first GA (Generally Available; i.e. stable) release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0. We have worked hard since our last major release on improving the reliability and user experience of Percona XtraBackup as well as adding features to make it better suited to more environments. The 2.0.0 release contains no [...]
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.
Impact of the number of idle connections in MySQL
Be careful with my findings, I appear to have compile in debug mode, I am redoing the benchmarks. Updated version here. I recently had to work with many customers having large number of connections opened in MySQL and although I told them this was not optimal, I had no solid arguments to present. More than [...]
PBXT in tpcc-like benchmark
Finally I was able to run PBXT 1.0.11 pre-GA in tpcc-like workload, apparently there was bug with did not allow me to get the result earlier, and I am happy to see that PBXT team managed it. For initial runs I took tpcc 100 warehouses ( about 10GB of data) which fully fits into memory [...]
Talking MySQL to Sphinx
In the recently released Sphinx version 0.9.9-rc2 there is a support for MySQL wire protocol and SphinxQL – SQL-like language to query Sphinx indexes. This support is currently in its early preview stage but it is still fun to play with. A thing to mention – unlike MySQL Storage Engines, some of which as InfoBright [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
New patches, new builds
We made new patches, improved previous and want to announce new builds for 5.0.62, 5.0.67 and 5.1.26 versions. One of biggest changes we separated releases of 5.0 into two branches. First, just “-percona” release is more stable and contains only stable and proven on many installation patches. Second is “-percona-highperf” release, which contains experimental patches [...]
To find the bottleneck, stop guessing and start measuring
We recently examined a customer’s system to try to speed up an ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) process for a big data set into a sort of datamart or DW. What we typically do is ask customers to run the process in question, and then examine what’s happening. In this case, the (very large, powerful) [...]
MySQL Performance on Memory Appliance
Recently I have had a chance to check out MySQL Performance on “Memory Appliance” by Violin Memory which can be used as extremely high speed storage system. I helped Violin Memory to optimize MySQL for customer workload and Violin memory and also had a chance to do some benchmarks on my own. 2*Quad Core Xeon [...]

