May 25, 2013

MySQL and the SSB – Part 2 – MyISAM vs InnoDB low concurrency

This blog post is part two in what is now a continuing series on the Star Schema Benchmark. In my previous blog post I compared MySQL 5.5.30 to MySQL 5.6.10, both with default settings using only the InnoDB storage engine.  In my testing I discovered that innodb_old_blocks_time had an effect on performance of the benchmark.  There was [...]

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

Find unused indexes

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 [...]

Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.0.0 GA

I’m really excited to today announce the first GA (Generally Available; i.e. stable) release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0. We have worked hard since our last major release on improving the reliability and user experience of Percona XtraBackup as well as adding features to make it better suited to more environments. The 2.0.0 release contains no [...]

MariaDB 5.3 is released as GA!

Congratulations to Monty Program and the many community contributors for releasing the GA version of MariaDB 5.3. We were in our annual all-staff meeting last week, so we are a little slow to blog about this and acknowledge the great work that has gone into MariaDB. Better late than never, I hope. Before I discuss [...]

Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views

Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]

InnoDB Flushing: a lot of memory and slow disk

You may have seen in the last couple of weekly news posts that Baron mentioned we are working on a new adaptive flushing algorithm in InnoDB. In fact, we already have three such algorithms in Percona Server (reflex, estimate, keep_average). Why do we need one more? Okay, first let me start by showing the current [...]

Percona’s Commitments to MySQL Users

You probably saw the Twitter storm over Oracle’s pricing changes and InnoDB in the last few days. The fear about Oracle removing InnoDB from the free version of MySQL was baseless — it was just a misunderstanding. Still, in the years since MySQL has been acquired by Sun, and then by Oracle, many MySQL users [...]

XtraDB feature: save / restore buffer pool

We recently released XtraDB-9, and while we did not highlight it in announcement, the release-making feature is ability to save and restore InnoDB buffer pool. The idea is not new and was originally developed by Jeremy Cole (sorry, I do not have the link on hands) some time ago, and now we implemented it in [...]

XtraDB: The Top 10 enhancements

Note: This post is part 2 of 4 on building our training workshop. Last week I talked about why you don’t want to shard. This week I’m following up with the top 10 enhancements that XtraDB has over the built-in InnoDB included in MySQL 5.0 and 5.1.  Building this list was not really a scientific [...]