As Percona Live London is raging in the UK, I thought it fitting to remind everyone about the next big Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 in Santa Clara, Californa on April 22-25, 2013. You can register NOW for this conference, and the Super Saving Registration deadline ends on December 28th, so be sure to [...]
Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 – News from the Committee – Tutorial Selection Complete
Full table scan vs full index scan performance
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 [...]
Get Me Some Query Logs!
One of my favorite tools in the Percona Toolkit is pt-query-digest. This tool is indispensable for identifying your top SQL queries, and analyzing which queries are accounting for your database load. But the report you get from pt-query-digest is only as good as the log of queries you give it as input. You need a large [...]
Edge-case behavior of INSERT…ODKU
A few weeks back, I was working on a customer issue wherein they were observing database performance that dropped through the floor (to the point of an outage) roughly every 4 weeks or so. Nothing special about the environment, the hardware, or the queries; really, the majority of the database was a single table with [...]
Using pt-table-checksum with Percona XtraDB Cluster
As of Percona Toolkit v2.1.5, pt-table-checksum works correctly with Percona XtraDB Cluster, but it doesn’t work quite like a traditional replication setup because cluster nodes are not like traditional replicas. In this post I demonstrate how to use pt-table-checksum with Percona XtraDB Cluster. First, you’ll need Percona Toolkit v2.1.5 or newer and Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.27-23.6 [...]
MySQL 5.6.7-RC in tpcc-mysql benchmark
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 [...]
Tools and Techniques for Index Design Webinar Questions Followup
I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of Tools and Techniques for Index Design. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. I’d like to invite folks who are interested in tools for query optimization to attend the new Percona [...]
How to find MySQL queries worth optimizing ?
One question I often get is how one can find out queries which should be optimized. By looking at pt-query-digest report it is easy to find slow queries or queries which cause the large portion of the load on the system but how do we know whenever there is any possibility to make this query [...]
Write contentions on the query cache
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 [...]
Distro Packages, Pre-built Binaries or Compile Your Own MySQL
I’ve been helping customers deploy and maintain MySQL (and variants) for the last couple of years and it has always been interesting to hear customer thoughts on how they want their servers installed. It has also been asked many times not only by our support and consulting customers, but widely from different forums and blogs [...]

