MySQL 5.6.7 RC is there, so I decided to test how it performs in tpcc-mysql workload from both performance and stability standpoints. I can’t say that my experience was totally flawless, I bumped into two bugs: MySQL 5.6.7 locks itself on CREATE INDEX MySQL 5.6.7-rc crashed under tpcc-mysql workload But at the end, is not [...]
Automation: A case for synchronous replication
Just yesterday I wrote about math of automatic failover today I’ll share my thoughts about what makes MySQL failover different from many other components and why asynchronous nature of standard replication solution is causing problems with it. Lets first think about properties of simple components we fail over – web servers, application servers etc. We [...]
Recovery deleted ibdata1
Recently I had a case when a customer deleted the InnoDB main table space – ibdata1 – and redo logs – ib_logfile*. MySQL keeps InnoDB files open all the time. The following recovery technique is based on this fact and it allowed to salvage the database. Actually, the files were deleted long time ago – [...]
DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL
Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]
Binary log file size matters (sometimes)
I used to think one should never look at max_binlog_size, however last year I had a couple of interesting cases which showed that sometimes it may be very important variable to tune properly. I meant to write about it earlier but never really had a chance to do it. I have it now!
The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages
This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship. Some basic facts Most of us know that writing into Innodb updates buffer [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster Feature 2: Multi-Master replication
This is about the second great feature – Multi-Master replication, what you get with Percona XtraDB Cluster. It is recommended you get familiar with general architecture of the cluster, described on the previous post. By Multi-Master I mean the ability to write to any node in your cluster and do not worry that eventually you [...]
Optimizing InnoDB for creating 30,000 tables (and nothing else)
Once upon a time, it would have been considered madness to even attempt to create 30,000 tables in InnoDB. That time is now a memory. We have customers with a lot more tables than a mere 30,000. There have historically been no tests for anything near this many tables in the MySQL test suite. So, [...]
Disaster: MySQL 5.5 Flushing
We raised topic of problems with flushing in InnoDB several times, some links: InnoDB Flushing theory and solutions MySQL 5.5.8 in search of stability This was not often recurring problem so far, however in my recent experiments, I observe it in very simple sysbench workload on hardware which can be considered as typical nowadays.
The case for getting rid of duplicate “sets”
The most useful feature of the relational database is that it allows us to easily process data in sets, which can be much faster than processing it serially. When the relational database was first implemented, write-ahead-logging and other technologies did not exist. This made it difficult to implement the database in a way that matched [...]

