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
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 [...]
A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins
MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]
Benchmarking single-row insert performance on Amazon EC2
I have been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and I have some interesting results that I wanted to share. I used a nice and effective tool iiBench which has been developed by Tokutek. Though the “1 billion row insert challenge” for which this tool was originally built is long over, [...]
Beware the Innodb Table Monitor
As I stated in my last post, I decided to use the Innodb Table monitor to diagnose an Index count mismatch error a customers found in their mysqld.err log to verify if the problem still existed. The Innodb Table Monitor has existed for basically forever in Innodb (the MySQL manual discusses it back in the 4.1 [...]
When EXPLAIN estimates can go wrong!
I have been working with a few customer cases and one interesting case popped up. The customer was facing a peculiar problem where the rows column in the EXPLAIN output of the query was totally off. The actual number of rows was 18 times more than the number of rows reported by MySQL in the [...]
Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio
I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]
Air traffic queries in MyISAM and Tokutek (TokuDB)
This is next post in series Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB Air traffic queries in LucidDB Air traffic queries in InfiniDB: early alpha Let me explain the reason of choosing these engines. After initial three posts I am often asked “What is baseline ? Can we compare results with standard MySQL engines [...]
Why you don’t want to shard.
Note: This blog post is part 1 of 4 on building our training workshop.
The Percona training workshop will not cover sharding. If you follow our blog, you’ll notice we don’t talk much about the subject; in some cases it makes sense, but in many we’ve seen that it causes architectures to be prematurely complicated.
So let me state it: You don’t want to shard.
Optimize everything else first, and then if performance still isn’t good enough, it’s time to take a very bitter medicine. The reason you need to shard basically comes down to one of these two reasons
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]

