May 22, 2013

Read/Write Splitting with PHP Webinar Questions Followup

Today I gave a presentation on “Read/Write Splitting with PHP” for Percona Webinars.  If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions.  I answered as many as I could during the session, but here are [...]

Fun with the MySQL pager command

Last time I wrote about a few tips that can make you more efficient when using the command line on Unix. Today I want to focus more on pager. The most common usage of pager is to set it to a Unix pager such as less. It can be very useful to view the result [...]

Sphinx search performance optimization: multi-threaded search

Queries in MySQL, Sphinx and many other database or search engines are typically single-threaded. That is when you issue a single query on your brand new r910 with 32 CPU cores and 16 disks, the maximum that is going to be used to process this query at any given point is 1 CPU core and [...]

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 [...]

Minimizing Downtime from Lengthy AWS Outages

Well, it happened again…  Another lengthy EBS outage in the US-East region impacted several sites across the net.  While failures like this are rare, they can be quite costly and translate into headaches for the operations team when impact production systems for any length of time.  At Percona, we routinely help clients architect and deploy [...]

The Math of Automated Failover

There are number of people recently blogging about MySQL automated failover, based on production incident which GitHub disclosed. Here is my take on it. When we look at systems providing high availability we can identify 2 cases of system breaking down. First is when the system itself has a bug or limitations which does not [...]

Wow. My 6 year old MySQL Bug is finally fixed in MySQL 5.6

I got the message in the morning today about the bug being fixed in MySQL 5.6.6…. which I reported in Early 2006 (while still being with MySQL) and running MySQL 4.1 I honestly thought this issue was fixed long ago as it was indeed pretty annoying. I must say I’m very impressed with Oracle team [...]

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 [...]

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

Percona XtraDB Cluster: Failure Scenarios with only 2 nodes

During the design period of a new cluster, it is always advised to have at least 3 nodes (this is the case with PXC but it’s also the same with PRM). But why and what are the risks ? The goal of having more than 2 nodes, in fact an odd number is recommended in [...]