During the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 the week before last, we quietly released Percona Toolkit 2.2.2 with a few bug fixes: pt-archiver –bulk-insert may corrupt data pt-heartbeat –utc –check always returns 0 pt-query-digest 2.2 prints unwanted debug info on tcpdump parsing errors pt-query-digest 2.2 prints too many string values Some tools don’t [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.2.2 released; bug fixes include pt-heartbeat & pt-archiver
Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif
There are times where you need to know exactly how much memory the mysqld server (or any other program) is using, where (i.e. for what function) it was allocated, how it got there (a backtrace, please!), and at what point in time the allocation happened. For example; you may have noticed a sharp memory increase [...]
Replication of the NOW() function (also, time travel)
Notice the result of the NOW() function in the following query. The query was run on a real database server and I didn’t change the clock of the server or change anything in the database configuration settings.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | mysql> SELECT NOW(),SYSDATE(); +---------------------+---------------------+ | NOW() | SYSDATE() | +---------------------+---------------------+ | 1999-01-01 00:00:00 | 2012-11-29 05:50:03 | +---------------------+---------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) |
You may proceed to party like it is 1999. How can the NOW() function return a value [...]
Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup
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 [...]
Statement based replication with Stored Functions, Triggers and Events
Statement based replication writes the queries that modify data in the Binary Log to replicate them on the slave or to use it as a PITR recovery. Here we will see what is the behavior of the MySQL when it needs to log “not usual” queries like Events, Functions, Stored Procedures, Local Variables, etc. We’ll [...]
Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views
Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
A micro-benchmark of stored routines in MySQL
Ever wondered how fast stored routines are in MySQL? I just ran a quick micro-benchmark to compare the speed of a stored function against a “roughly equivalent” subquery. The idea — and there may be shortcomings that are poisoning the results here, your comments welcome — is to see how fast the SQL procedure code [...]
A rule of thumb for choosing column order in indexes
I wanted to share a little rule of thumb I sometimes use to decide which columns should come first in an index. This is not specific to MySQL, it’s generally applicable to any database server with b-tree indexes. And there are a bunch of subtleties, but I will also ignore those for the sake of [...]
Stored Function to generate Sequences
Today a customer asked me to help them to convert their sequence generation process to the stored procedure and even though I have already seen it somewhere I did not find it with two minutes of googling so I wrote a simple one myself and posting it here for public benefit or my later use

