May 25, 2013

Improved InnoDB fast index creation

One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER TABLE [...]

Shard-Query EC2 images available

Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Is disk Everything for MySQL Performance ?

I read very nice post by Matt today and it has many good insights though I can’t say I agree on all points. First there is a lot of people out where which put it as disk is everything. Remember Paul Tuckfield saying “You should ask how many disks they have instead of how many [...]

Monty unviels Maria and starts Blogging

This weekend we’re hearing great news from Michael “Monty” Widenius – one of the Fathers of MySQL. Monty finally found a time to create his own blog with very descriptive name Monty Says. At the same time Monty finally announces Maria – the MyISAM successor storage engine he has been working for last few years. [...]

Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?

Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]

PHP Large result sets and summary tables.

We’re working with web site preparing for massive growth. To make sure it handles large data sets as part of the process we work on generation test database of significant size as testing your application on table with 1000 rows may well give you very dangerous false sense of security. One of the process web [...]

Using LoadAvg for Performance Optimization

Linux and Unixes have excellent metric of system load called “loadavg”. In fact load average is is 3 numbers which correspond to “load average” calculated for one five and 15 minutes. It is computed as exponential moving average so most recent load have more weight in the value than old one. What does Load Average [...]

Are PHP persistent connections evil ?

As you probably know PHP “mysql” extension supported persistent connections but they were disabled in new “mysqli” extension, which is probably one of the reasons some people delay migration to this extension. The reason behind using persistent connections is of course reducing number of connects which are rather expensive, even though they are much faster [...]