May 26, 2013

Fun with the MySQL pager command

January 21, 2013 By 6 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: ,

Sphinx search performance optimization: multi-threaded search

January 16, 2013 By 9 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: MySQL Tagged With: , , ,

Percona Toolkit by example – pt-stalk

January 3, 2013 By 3 Comments

pt-stalk recipes: Gather forensic data about MySQL when a server problem occurs It happens to us all from time to time: a server issue arises that leaves you scratching your head. That’s when Percona Toolkit’s pt-stalk comes into play, helping you diagnose the problem by capturing diagnostic data that helps you pinpoint what’s causing the [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL, Percona Software, Percona Toolkit Tagged With: , , , ,

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

December 14, 2012 By 6 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL

Full table scan vs full index scan performance

November 23, 2012 By 15 Comments

Earlier this week, Cédric blogged about how easy we can get confused between a covering index and a full index scan in the EXPLAIN output. While a covering index (seen with EXPLAIN as Extra: Using index) is a very interesting performance optimization, a full index scan (type: index) is according to the documentation the 2nd [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: ,

Understanding Multi-node writing conflict metrics in Percona XtraDB Cluster and Galera

November 20, 2012 By 17 Comments

I have addressed previously how multi-node writing causes unexpected deadlocks in PXC, at least, it is unexpected unless you know how Galera replication works.  This is a complicated topic and I personally feel like I’m only just starting to wrap my head around it. The magic of Galera replication The short of it is that Galera [...]

Filed Under: MySQL, XtraDB Cluster

Automation: A case for synchronous replication

September 19, 2012 By 2 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

How to obtain the “LES” (Last Executed Statement) from an Optimized Core Dump?

September 9, 2012 By 9 Comments

Ever ran into a situation where you saw “some important variable you really needed to know about=<optimized out>” while debugging?

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL

Write contentions on the query cache

September 5, 2012 By 5 Comments

While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

Find unused indexes

June 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL, Percona Software
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