May 21, 2013

How Can Percona MySQL Server Development Services Help ?

At Percona we offer a number of services. One of them, Custom MySQL Server Development, is commonly the most misunderstood and undervalued. There are a lot of ways Percona custom MySQL server development can help your business be more successful with MySQL. Here are some ways: Bugs – There are Bugs in MySQL, Percona Server, [...]

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 1: High Availability

There and in coming posts I am going to cover main features of Percona XtraDB Cluster. The first feature is High Availability. But before jumping to HA, let’s review general architecture of the Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Percona Testing: Innodb crash / recovery tests available

Not everyone may know this, but there are precious few innodb crash recovery tests available. Some folks have noticed this and asked for something to be done about it, but unfortunately, no tests have been created for the main MySQL branch. The MySQL at Facebook branch has a number of tests that are quite interesting.  [...]

MLC SSD card lifetime and write amplification

As MLC-based SSD cards are raising popularity, there is also a raising concern how long it can survive. As we know, a MLC NAND module can handle 5,000-10,000 erasing cycles, after which it gets unusable. And obviously the SSD card based on MLC NAND has a limited lifetime. There is a lot of misconceptions and [...]

Reasons for MySQL Replication Lag

One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]

How Innodb Contention may manifest itself

Even though multiple fixes have been implemented in Percona Server and MySQL 5.5, there are still workloads in which case mutex (or rw-lock) contention is a performance limiting factor, helped by ever growing number of cores available in the systems. It is interesting though the contention may manifest itself in the different form from the [...]

Reasons for run-away main Innodb Tablespace

So you’re running MySQL With innodb_file_per_table option but your ibdata1 file which holds main (or system) tablespace have grown dramatically from its starting 10MB size. What could be the reason of this growth and what you can do about it ? There are few things which are always stored in main tablespace – these are [...]

Effect of adaptive_flushing

I recently had the chance to witness the effects of innodb_adaptive_flushing on the performance of InnoDB Plugin 1.0.5 in the wild, which Yasufumi wrote about previously here and here. The server in question was Solaris 10 with 8 disk RAID10 and 2 32GB SSDs used for ZIL and L2ARC, 72G RAM and 40G buffer pool. [...]

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 ?