I do not know if it is because we’re hosting a free webinar on migrating MyISAM to Innodb or some other reason but recently I see a lot of questions about migration from MyISAM to Innodb. Webinar will cover the process in a lot more details though I would like to go over basics in [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 1: Single-Threaded Replication
I recently mentioned a few of the big “non-starter” limitations Postgres has overcome for specific use cases. I decided to write a series of blog posts on MySQL’s unsolved severe limitations. I mean limitations that really hobble it for major, important needs — not in areas where it isn’t used, but in areas where it [...]
Percona Server 5.1.47-rel11.0
Dear Community, Percona Server version 5.1.47-rel11.0 is available for download now. The changes in this release include: New features Percona Server is now based on MySQL 5.1.47, and XtraDB is now based on InnoDB plugin 1.0.8. XtraDB now uses the fast recovery code released in InnoDB Plugin version 1.0.8, instead of Percona’s earlier fast-recovery code. [...]
Checking for a live database connection considered harmful
It is very common for me to look at a customer’s database and notice a lot of overhead from checking whether a database connection is active before sending a query to it. This comes from the following design pattern, written in pseudo-code:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | function query_database(connection, sql) if !connection.is_alive() and !connection.reconnect() then throw exception end return connection.execute(sql) end |
Many of the popular development platforms do something similar to this. Two [...]
READ-COMMITED vs REPETABLE-READ in tpcc-like load
Question what is better isolation level is poping up again and again. Recently it was discussed in InnoDB : Any real performance improvement when using READ COMMITED isolation level ? and in Repeatable read versus read committed for InnoDB . Serge in his post explains why READ COMMITED is better for TPCC load, so why [...]
Should you move from MyISAM to Innodb ?
There is significant portion of customers which are still using MyISAM when they come to us, so one of the big questions is when it is feasible to move to Innodb and when staying on MyISAM is preferred ? I generally prefer to see Innodb as the main storage engine because it makes life much [...]
Innodb Performance Optimization Basics
Interviewing people for our Job Openings I like to ask them a basic question – if you have a server with 16GB of RAM which will be dedicated for MySQL with large Innodb database using typical Web workload what settings you would adjust and interestingly enough most people fail to come up with anything reasonable. [...]
Consulting for MySQL
Percona offers consulting (and training, and support, and development) services for MySQL and LAMP applications. We can help with all areas of the MySQL Server – Operations, Application Design, Custom Feature development, and so on. Please visit our company website to learn more about our MySQL consulting and other services for MySQL, our more than [...]
SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through
Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]

