A while back Friendfeed posted a blog post explaining how they changed from storing data in MySQL columns to serializing data and just storing it inside TEXT/BLOB columns. It seems that since then, the technique has gotten more popular with Ruby gems now around to do this for you automatically.
Great work Innodb Team
I thought I should praise Innodb team for all the work they have been doing recently. We see a lot of cool stuff happening, especially in the area of our interest which is Performance And Scalability. Innodb Plugin 1.0.4 had a lot of great performance improvements and 1.0.5/1.0.6 gets even further with long standing caching [...]
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 [...]
Performance improvements in Percona 5.0.83 and XtraDB
There was small delay in our releases, part of this time we worked on features I mentioned before: – Moving InnoDB tables between servers – Improve InnoDB recovery time and rest time we played with performance trying to align XtraDB performance with MySQL 5.4 ® and also port all performance fixes to 5.0 tree. So [...]
Call for opinions: Do we need MySQL 5.0 with MySQL 5.4 performance
MySQL 5.4 comes with Innodb engine which seems to have much better performance than MySQL 5.0 – this is due to locking and IO patches from Google integrated in this release (which are similar to appropriate Percona patches) as well as some unique fixes such as different innodb_thread_concurrency handling and other optimization. Should we take [...]
Detailed review of Tokutek storage engine
(Note: Review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) I had a chance to take look TokuDB (the name of the Tokutek storage engine), and run some benchmarks. Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there only few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box [...]
Compression for InnoDB backup
Playing with last version of xtrabackup and compress it I noticed that gzip is unacceptable slow for both compression and decompression operations. Actually Peter wrote about it some time ago, but I wanted to review that data having some new information. In current multi-core word the compression utility should utilize several CPU to speedup operation, [...]
How network can impact MySQL Operations ?
This week I’ve worked with the customer doing certain work during maintenance window which involved a lot of data copying around between MySQL boxes. We had prepared well and had measured how fast we could copy the data between servers of these kind connected to the same network, and we did the same thing before. [...]
Beware of MyISAM Key Cache mutex contention
Today I was working with the client loading data to MyISAM tables at very high rate. Hundreds of millions rows are loaded daily into single MySQL instance with bursts up to 100K of records/sec which need to be inserted (in the table with few indexes). It was good not all records had to go to [...]
How would you compress your MySQL Backup
Backing up MySQL Database most people compress them – which can make a good sense in terms of backup and recovery speed as well as space needed or be a serious bottleneck depending on circumstances and approach used. First I should mention this question mainly arises for medium and large size databases – for databases [...]

