May 21, 2013

Percona Server on the Raspberry Pi: Your own MySQL Database Server for Under $80

There are many reasons for wanting a small MySQL database server: You’re a uni student who wants to learn the SQL language better and needs a mini-testbox You’re a Windows user who wants to play around with Percona Server on Linux You’re a corporate application developer who wants a small SQL development & test box [...]

Analyzing Slow Query Table in MySQL 5.6

Next week I’m teaching an online Percona Training class, called Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit.  This is a guided tour of best practices for pt-query-digest, the best tool for evaluating where your database response time is being spent. This month we saw the GA release of MySQL 5.6, and I wanted to check if any [...]

Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.0.5

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0.5 on January 23rd, 2012. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories. This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.0 series. New Features: New option –defaults-extra-file has been introduced. This option specifies from what extra file to read [...]

Is there room for more MySQL IO Optimization?

I prefer to run MySQL with innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT in most cases – it makes sure there is no overhead of double buffering and I can save the limited amount of file system cache I would normally have on database server for those things which need to be cached — system files, binary log, FRM files, MySQL [...]

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]

Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)

I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding.  They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]

Announcing Percona Playback 0.5

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Playback 0.5 on November 26th, 2012. Downloads are available from our download site and Percona Software Repositories. Percona Playback is a tool for replaying the load of one database server to another. Currently it can read queries from MySQL query-log and tcpdump files and run them [...]

Full table scan vs full index scan performance

Earlier this week, Cédric blogged about how easy we can get confused between a covering index and a full index scan in the EXPLAIN output. While a covering index (seen with EXPLAIN as Extra: Using index) is a very interesting performance optimization, a full index scan (type: index) is according to the documentation the 2nd [...]

Concatenating MyISAM files

Recently, I found myself involved in the migration of a large read-only InnoDB database to MyISAM (eventually packed). The only issue was that for one of the table, we were talking of 5 TB of data, 23B rows. Not small… I calculated that with something like insert into MyISAM_table… select * from Innodb_table… would take [...]

Debugging MySQL SSL problems

This is not necessarily going to be a comprehensive post, but I learned somethings about MySQL SSL today that I thought would be worth sharing. I was setting up a PRM install for a customer and one of the requirements was SSL replication.  In this particular case, I had setup PRM first, and then was [...]