I had the chance to work on an interesting case last week, and I thought I’d share what I think is a little known goodie from Percona Toolkit for MySQL called pt-query-digest. One customer was suffering from periods of high load on their database server, leading to degraded application performance, and sometimes even short moments [...]
10 years of MySQL User Conferences
In preparing for this month’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, I’ve been reminiscing about the annual MySQL User Conference’s history – the 9 times it previously took place in its various reincarnations – and there are a lot of good things, fun things to remember. 2003 was the year that marked the first MySQL user conference [...]
Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013: It feels like 2007 again
I actually don’t remember exactly whether it was in 2006, 2007 or 2008 — but around that time the MySQL community had one of the greatest MySQL conferences put on by O’Reilly and MySQL. It was a good, stable, predictable time. Shortly thereafter, the MySQL world saw acquisitions, forks, times of uncertainly, more acquisitions, more forks, [...]
Win Free MySQL Conference Tickets!
We’re giving away three full conference passes (worth $995 each) to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, and you can win one simply by sharing the conference with your friends and colleagues! Second prize is one of ten copies of the new High Performance MySQL, 3rd Edition (worth $55 each), the recently released update [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Upgrade Performance Regressions
So lets say you upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to Percona Server 5.5 and instead of expected performance improvement you see your performance being worse. What should you do ? First if you followed MySQL upgrade best practices such as testing your workload with pt-upgrade the chances of this happening are rather slim. But lets assume [...]
Getting MySQL Core file on Linux
Core file can be quite helpful to troubleshoot MySQL Crashes yet it is not always easy to get, especially with recent Linux distributions which have security features to prevent core files to be dumped by setuid processes (and MySQL Server is most commonly ran changing user from “root” to “mysql”). Before you embark on enabling [...]
MySQL 5.5.8 – in search of stability
A couple of days ago, Dimitri published a blog post, Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5, which was a response to my post, MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive. I will refer to Dimitri’s article as article [1]. As always, Dimitri has provided a very detailed and thoughtful article, and I strongly recommend reading if [...]
Virident tachIOn: New player on Flash PCI-E cards market
(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 [...]
Upgrading MySQL
Upgrading MySQL Server is a very interesting task as you can approach it with so much different “depth”. For some this is 15 minutes job for others it is many month projects. Why is that ? Performing MySQL upgrade two things should normally worry you. It is Regressions – functionality regressions when what you’ve been [...]
How Percona Develops Open-Source Software
Percona has been building and contributing to open-source software since the company was founded, and individually we’ve been doing the same thing for many years. We think it’s a huge value for our customers and the community. We’re involved in a dozen or so open-source projects, but our three core efforts at the moment are [...]

