Over the last few years, Domas’s technique of using GDB as a profiler has become a key tool in helping us analyze MySQL when customers are having trouble. We have our own implementation of it in Percona Toolkit (pt-pmp) and we gather GDB backtraces from pt-stalk and pt-collect. Although it’s helped us figure out a [...]
MySQL Life Cycle. Your Feedback is needed.
When I started with MySQL 3.22 I would start running MySQL from early beta (if not alpha) and update MySQL the same date as release would hit the web. Since that time I matured and so did MySQL ecosystem. MySQL is powering a lot more demanding and business critical applications now than 12 years ago [...]
White Paper: Flashcache and MySQL on Virident drive
Our latest MySQL white paper is Improving Percona Server performance with Flashcache on the Virident tachIOn Drive. (Virident funded the research, but as always, we wrote the report ourselves.) The conclusion is that Flashcache can be good for read-heavy workloads, but more research is needed to understand its performance characteristics on write-heavy workloads. We explain [...]
Recovering Linux software RAID, RAID5 Array
Dealing with MySQL you might need to deal with RAID recovery every so often. Sometimes because of client lacking the proper backup or sometimes because recovering RAID might improve recovery, for example you might get point in time recovery while backup setup only takes you to the point where last binary log was backed up. [...]
Flexviews is a working scalable database transactional memory example
http://Flexvie.ws fully implements a method for creating materialized views for MySQL data sets. The tool is for MySQL, but the methods are database agnostic. A materialized view is an analogue of software transactional memory. You can think of this as database transactional memory, or as database state distributed over time, but in an easy way [...]
How Percona strives to remain neutral and independent
Many of the prominent companies in the MySQL ecosystem are Percona customers, including hardware manufacturers, software developers, hosted service providers, and appliance developers. We perform paid and unpaid research on their products, and we publish blog posts related to their products or services. Independence and objectivity are core Percona values. How do we balance the [...]
How to debug long-running transactions in MySQL
Among the many things that can cause a “server stall” is a long-running transaction. If a transaction remains open for a very long time without committing, and has modified data, then other transactions could block and fail with a lock wait timeout. The problem is, it can be very difficult to find the offending code [...]
Percona Server and XtraBackup weekly news, March 5th
What’s new this week in Percona Server:
Percona Server now both SQL and NOSQL
Just yesterday we released Percona Server 5.1.52-12.3 which includes HandlerSocket. This is third-party plugin, developed by Akira Higuci, DeNA Co., Ltd and explained in Yoshinori Matsunobu’s blog post. What is so special about it: It provides NOSQL-like requests to data stored in XtraDB. So in the same time you can access your data in SQL [...]
XtraDB feature: save / restore buffer pool
We recently released XtraDB-9, and while we did not highlight it in announcement, the release-making feature is ability to save and restore InnoDB buffer pool. The idea is not new and was originally developed by Jeremy Cole (sorry, I do not have the link on hands) some time ago, and now we implemented it in [...]

