We’re hiring. We are looking for the following qualifications: Expert knowledge of MySQL. Not just “certified” — years of production experience with it. You need to know server internals, for example. You need to be able to do anything from optimizing difficult queries to moving high-volume services between data centers without interruption. Expert knowledge of [...]
Finding your MySQL High-Availability solution – The questions
October 16, 2009 By 36 Comments
After having reviewed the definition my the previous post (The definitions), the next step is to respond to some questions. Do you need MySQL High-Availability? That question is quite obvious but some times, it is skipped. It can also be formulated “What is the downtime cost of the service?”. In the cost, you need to [...]
Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge
September 19, 2009 By 31 Comments
The mistake I commonly see among MySQL users is how indexes are created. Quite commonly people just index individual columns as they are referenced in where clause thinking this is the optimal indexing strategy. For example if I would have something like AGE=18 AND STATE=’CA’ they would create 2 separate indexes on AGE and STATE [...]
SystemTap – DTrace for Linux ?
September 14, 2009 By 17 Comments
Since DTrace was released for Solaris I am missing it on Linux systems… It can’t be included in Linux by the same reason why ZFS can’t be – it’s licensing issue. Both ZFS and DTrace are under CDDL, which is incompatible with GPL. So you can see DTrace and ZFS on Solaris, FreeBSD, MacOS, but [...]
Just do the math!
July 6, 2009 By 4 Comments
One of the most typical reasons for performance and scalability problems I encounter is simply failing to do the math. And these are typically bad one because it often leads to implementing architectures which are not up for job they are intended to solve. Let me start with example to make it clear. Lets say [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments
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 [...]
MySQL extensions for hosting
April 24, 2008 By 11 Comments
A few weeks ago I was asked to isolate some functionalities from Mark Callaghan’s MySQL patch bundle. They were extensions adding per-user and per-table accounting to the database, accessible with a new set of commands such as SHOW TABLE_STATISTICS, SHOW INDEX_STATISTICS and SHOW USER_STATISTICS. The first two can interest anyone to periodically check what data [...]
Sharding and Time Base Partitioning
March 14, 2008 By 12 Comments
For large number of online applications once you implemented proper sharding you can consider your scaling problems solved – by getting more and more hardware you can grow. As I recently wrote it however does not mean it is the most optimal way by itself to do things. The “classical” sharding involves partitioning by user_id,site_id [...]
Economics of Performance Optimization
March 13, 2008 By 9 Comments
I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are: Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ? Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ? The answer [...]
MySQL Full Text Search in Action
February 7, 2008 By 9 Comments
Preparing to move I’m selling stuff on GumTree which is UK based clone of Craigslist offering similar functionality but with Ads Similarly to Craigslist GumTree is powered by MySQL but unlike craigslist it looks like they are shy in tuning their MySQL Full Text Search index configuration and setting proper ft_min_word_len value. Searching for Audi [...]
