One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]
Introducing our Percona Live speakers
May 10, 2011 By 4 Comments
We have mostly finalized the Percona Live schedule at this point, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to introduce who’s going to be speaking and what they’ll cover. A brief explanation first: we’ve personally recruited the speakers, which is why it has been a slow process to finalize and get abstracts on the [...]
Performance or Stability ???
April 1, 2011 By 16 Comments
Sometimes the question is put like are you looking for Performance OR Stability, which I believe is a strange way to put it. In real life systems you care both about Performance AND Stability. I would even say Stability is a not the best world here, I would day you care about your minimal performance [...]
How to Identify Bad Queries in MySQL
January 10, 2011 By 16 Comments
Finding bad queries is a big part of optimization. A scientific optimization process can be simplified to “can anything be improved for less than it costs not to improve it? – if not, we’re done.” In databases, we care most about the work the database is doing. That is, queries. There are other things we [...]
Advanced index analysis with mk-index-usage
November 11, 2010 By 2 Comments
The new release of Maatkit has a useful feature in mk-index-usage to help you determine how indexes are used in more flexible ways. The default report just prints out ALTER statements for removing unused indexes, which is nice, but it’s often helpful to ask more sophisticated questions about index usage. I’ll use this blog’s queries [...]
Impact of the sort buffer size in MySQL
October 25, 2010 By 8 Comments
The parameter sort_buffer_size is one the MySQL parameters that is far from obvious to adjust. It is a per session buffer that is allocated every time it is needed. The problem with the sort buffer comes from the way Linux allocates memory. Monty Taylor (here) have described the underlying issue in detail, but basically above [...]
Cache Miss Storm
September 10, 2010 By 30 Comments
I worked on the problem recently which showed itself as rather low MySQL load (probably 5% CPU usage and close to zero IO) would spike to have hundreds instances of threads running at the same time, causing intense utilization spike and server very unresponsive for anywhere from half a minute to ten minutes until everything [...]
Estimating Replication Capacity
July 20, 2010 By 4 Comments
It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to optimize your system when your replication runs [...]
Data mart or data warehouse?
July 15, 2010 By 13 Comments
This is part two in my six part series on business intelligence, with a focus on OLAP analysis. Part 1 – Intro to OLAP Identifying the differences between a data warehouse and a data mart. (this post) Introduction to MDX and the kind of SQL which a ROLAP tool must generate to answer those queries. [...]
Scaling: Consider both Size and Load
July 13, 2010 By 5 Comments
So lets imagine you have the server handling 100.000 user accounts. You can see the CPU,IO and Network usage is below 10% of capacity – does it mean you can count on server being able to handle 1.000.000 of accounts ? Not really, and there are few reasons why, I’ll name most important of them: [...]
