May 19, 2013

Percona White Paper: Architecting SaaS Applications with XtraDB

Vadim and I have just published a new technical white paper. It shows how Percona Server with XtraDB can make large-scale multi-tenant databases easier to build with MySQL. Our experiences working with SaaS and shared-hosting companies influenced the features we included in Percona Server and XtraDB, and I think this is the best explanation of [...]

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 [...]

Three key things to know about moving MySQL into the cloud.

The question “what problems will I have when migrating to the cloud” gets asked often enough. If by cloud you mean Amazon EC2, then from a technical perspective there isn’t much that changes. The biggest thing that changes is just how you pay your bill. Having said that, there’s still a few potential gotchas: There [...]

When would you use SAN with MySQL ?

One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?

Limiting InnoDB Data Dictionary

One of InnoDB’s features is that memory allocated for internal tables definitions is not limited and may grow indefinitely. You may not notice it if you have an usual application with say 100-1000 tables. But for hosting providers and for user oriented applications ( each user has dedicated database / table) it is disaster. For [...]

5.0.75-build12 Percona binaries

After several important fixes to our patches we made binaries for build12. Fixes include: Control of InnoDB insert buffer to address problems Peter mentioned http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/01/13/some-little-known-facts-about-innodb-insert-buffer/, also check Bug 41811 to see symptoms of problem with Insert buffer. http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/patches:innodb_io_patches * innodb_flush_neighbor_pages (default 1) – When the dirty page are flushed (written to datafile), this parameter determines [...]

MySQL for Hosting Providers – how do they manage ?

Working with number of hosting providers I always wonder how do they manage to keep things up given MySQL gives you so little ways to really restrict how much resources single user can consume. I have written over a year ago about 10+ ways to crash or overload MySQL and since that people have come [...]

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

Percona’s patches spread to a wider audience

Percona’s patches are now available to a wider audience via OurDelta, a community effort to provide  builds with features (Percona patches, Google patches, etc) and storage engines (PBXT, Sphinx, etc) that aren’t in the main MySQL server. Arjen Lentz is really the brainchild behind this. Kudos Arjen! What does this mean for the Percona patches? [...]

Google’s user_statistics V2 port and changes

Recently Google published V2 release of patches, one of them user_statistics we use in our releases. New features are quite interesting so we decided to port it to fresh releases of MySQL. Features includes: New statistics per user (Cpu_time, Bytes_received, Bytes_sent, etc) New command SHOW CLIENT_STATISTICS, which shows statistics per client’s hostname, not per user [...]