There are two ways InnoDB can organize tablespaces. First is when all data, indexes and system buffers are stored in a single tablespace. This is typicaly one or several ibdata files. A well known innodb_file_per_table option brings the second one. Tables and system areas are split into different files. Usually system tablespace is located in [...]
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 [...]
How to use tcpdump on very busy hosts
Often I run into problems when trying to use mk-query-digest with tcpdump on “very” busy hosts. You might be thinking, “very busy is a relative and unquantifiable term,” and you’d be right, so I’ll phrase this differently. Let me give a little background to the problem first. Mk-query-digest tries to handle dropped or missing packets [...]
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 [...]
fsyncs on software raid on FusionIO
As soon as we get couple FusionIO cards, there is question how to join them in single space for database. FusionIO does not provide any mirroring/stripping solutions and totally relies on OS tools there. So for Linux we have software RAID and LVM, I tried to followup on my post How many fsync / sec [...]
Tokyo Tyrant – The Extras Part I : Is it Durable?
You know how in addition to the main movie you have extras on the DVD. Extra commentary, bloopers, extra scenes, etc? Well welcome the Tyrant extras. With my previous blog posts I was trying to set-up a case for looking at NOSQL tools, and not meant to be a decision making tool. Each solution has [...]
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]
SHOW OPEN TABLES – what is in your table cache
One command, which few people realize exists is SHOW OPEN TABLES – it allows you to examine what tables do you have open right now:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | mysql> show open tables from test; +----------+-------+--------+-------------+ | Database | Table | In_use | Name_locked | +----------+-------+--------+-------------+ | test | a | 3 | 0 | +----------+-------+--------+-------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) |
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 [...]
A quest for the full InnoDB status
When running InnoDB you are able to dig into the engine internals, look at various gauges and counters, see past deadlocks and the list of all open transactions. This is in your reach with one simple command —
1 | SHOW ENGINE InnoDB STATUS |
. On most occasions it works beautifully. The problems appear when you have a large spike in [...]

