May 23, 2013

Filling the tmp partition with persistent connections

The use of tmpfs/ramfs as /tmp partition is a common trick to improve the performance of on-disk temporary tables. Servers usually have less RAM than disk space so those kind of partitions are very limited in size and there are some cases were we can run out of space. Let’s see one example. We’re running [...]

Find and remove duplicate indexes

Having duplicate keys in our schemas can hurt the performance of our database: They make the optimizer phase slower because MySQL needs to examine more query plans. The storage engine needs to maintain, calculate and update more index statistics DML and even read queries can be slower because MySQL needs update fetch more data to [...]

Comparing Percona XtraDB Cluster with Semi-Sync replication Cross-WAN

I have a customer who is considering Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a two colo WAN environment.  They wanted me to do a test comparing PXC against semi-synchronous replication to see how they stack up against each other. Test Environment The test environment included AWS EC2 nodes in US-East and US-West (Oregon).  The ping RTT latency [...]

Announcement of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.20 GA release

I am excited to announce the availability of the GA release of our new product Percona XtraDB Cluster. Percona XtraDB Cluster is a High Availability and Scalability solution for MySQL Users and is based on Percona Server 5.5.20. With this release we make clustering very easy and affordable for everyone. You can convert your existing [...]

Troubleshooting MySQL Upgrade Performance Regressions

So lets say you upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to Percona Server 5.5 and instead of expected performance improvement you see your performance being worse. What should you do ? First if you followed MySQL upgrade best practices such as testing your workload with pt-upgrade the chances of this happening are rather slim. But lets assume [...]

MySQL Configuration Wizard Updated

We’ve released an updated version of the MySQL Configuration Wizard we announced at the end of last year. If you don’t remember that announcement, here’s the short version: this is a tool to help you generate my.cnf files based on your server’s hardware and other characteristics. We’ve gotten really good feedback on this tool, including [...]

Identifying the load with the help of pt-query-digest and Percona Server

Overview Profiling, analyzing and then fixing queries is likely the most oft-repeated part of a job of a DBA and one that keeps evolving, as new features are added to the application new queries pop up that need to be analyzed and fixed. And there are not too many tools out there that can make [...]

Beware the Innodb Table Monitor

As I stated in my last post, I decided to use the Innodb Table monitor to diagnose an Index count mismatch error a customers found in their mysqld.err log to verify if the problem still existed. The Innodb Table Monitor has existed for basically forever in Innodb (the MySQL manual discusses it back in the 4.1 [...]

Avoiding auto-increment holes on InnoDB with INSERT IGNORE

Are you using InnoDB tables on MySQL version 5.1.22 or newer? If so, you probably have gaps in your auto-increment columns. A simple INSERT IGNORE query creates gaps for every ignored insert, but this is undocumented behaviour. This documentation bug is already submitted. Firstly, we will start with a simple question. Why do we have [...]

Emulating global transaction ID with pt-heartbeat

Global transaction IDs are being considered for a future version of MySQL. A global transaction ID lets you determine a server’s replication position reliably, among other benefits. This is great when you need to switch a replica to another master, or any number of other needs. Sometimes you can’t wait for the real thing, but [...]