May 23, 2013

Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.1.1 GA

May 15, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.1 on May 15th 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories. Percona XtraBackup enables backups without blocking user queries, making it ideal for companies with large data sets and mission-critical applications that cannot tolerate long periods of downtime. Offered [...]

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MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

March 11, 2013 By 7 Comments

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

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

February 26, 2013 By 1 Comment

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 [...]

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

Is there room for more MySQL IO Optimization?

January 3, 2013 By 11 Comments

I prefer to run MySQL with innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT in most cases – it makes sure there is no overhead of double buffering and I can save the limited amount of file system cache I would normally have on database server for those things which need to be cached — system files, binary log, FRM files, MySQL [...]

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Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)

December 5, 2012 By 2 Comments

I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding.  They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL, Percona Software

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

August 16, 2012 By 4 Comments

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

ALTER TABLE: Creating Index by Sort and Buffer Pool Size

June 27, 2012 By 4 Comments

Today I was looking at the ALTER TABLE performance with fast index creation and without it with different buffer pool sizes. Results are pretty interesting. I used modified Sysbench table for these tests because original table as initially created only has index on column K which initially contains only zeros, which means index is very [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

Building Indexes by Sorting In Innodb (AKA Fast Index Creation)

June 19, 2012 By 2 Comments

Innodb can indexes built by sort since Innodb Plugin for MySQL 5.1 which is a lot faster than building them through insertion, especially for tables much larger than memory and large uncorrelated indexes you might be looking at 10x difference or more. Yet for some reason Innodb team has chosen to use very small (just [...]

Filed Under: Benchmarks, Insight for DBAs, MySQL

How expensive is USER_STATISTICS?

June 2, 2012 By 14 Comments

One of our customers asked me whether it’s safe to enable the so-called USER_STATISTICS features of Percona Server in a heavy-use production server with many tens of thousands of tables. If you’re not familiar with this feature, it creates some new INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables that add counters for activity on users, hosts, tables, indexes, and more. [...]

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

A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins

May 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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 [...]

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