May 22, 2013

Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 1

May 16, 2013 By 3 Comments

(This is part one of a two part series) Over the past few weeks I have been looking at a preview release of Virident’s vCache software, which is a kernel module and set of utilities designed to provide functionality similar to that of FlashCache. In particular, Virident engaged Percona to do a usability and feature-set [...]

Filed Under: Benchmarks, Hardware and Storage, MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

February 26, 2013 By 1 Comment

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

Percona Welcomes MySQL 5.6!

February 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment

MySQL 5.6 was made generally available as a production-ready solution earlier this month. This release comes about 2 years after MySQL 5.5 was released, but MySQL 5.6 contains improvements started long before that – for example, work on the Innodb Full Text Search project was started over 6 years ago, in addition with many optimizer [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL, Percona Software, Percona Toolkit

Is MySQL 5.6 slower than MySQL 5.5?

February 18, 2013 By 23 Comments

There have been a number reports/benchmarks showing MySQL 5.6 to be slower than MySQL 5.5 on variety of workloads. There are many possible reasons and I believe we will learn about many of them in the next few weeks and months as MySQL 5.6 is starting to get production battle-tested and there is inflow of [...]

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Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup

August 24, 2012 By 5 Comments

I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance.  Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions.  Here are their questions and my [...]

Filed Under: Events and Announcements, Insight for Developers, MySQL

Moving from MyISAM to Innodb or XtraDB. Basics

November 22, 2010 By 2 Comments

I do not know if it is because we’re hosting a free webinar on migrating MyISAM to Innodb or some other reason but recently I see a lot of questions about migration from MyISAM to Innodb. Webinar will cover the process in a lot more details though I would like to go over basics in [...]

Filed Under: Events and Announcements, MySQL Tagged With: , ,

Virident tachIOn: New player on Flash PCI-E cards market

June 15, 2010 By 19 Comments

(Note: The review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) In my talk on MySQL Conference and Expo 2010 “An Overview of Flash Storage for Databases” I mentioned that most likely there are other players coming soon. I actually was not aware about any real [...]

Filed Under: Benchmarks, MySQL Tagged With: , ,

Tuning InnoDB Concurrency Tickets

May 24, 2010 By 5 Comments

InnoDB has an oft-unused parameter innodb_concurrency_tickets that seems widely misunderstood. From the docs: “The number of threads that can enter InnoDB concurrently is determined by the innodb_thread_concurrency variable. A thread is placed in a queue when it tries to enter InnoDB if the number of threads has already reached the concurrency limit. When a thread [...]

Filed Under: Benchmarks, Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: , , , ,

Checking for a live database connection considered harmful

May 5, 2010 By 38 Comments

It is very common for me to look at a customer’s database and notice a lot of overhead from checking whether a database connection is active before sending a query to it. This comes from the following design pattern, written in pseudo-code:

Many of the popular development platforms do something similar to this. Two [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers, MySQL

Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio

February 28, 2010 By 28 Comments

I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]

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