I wanted for a while to write about using MySQL Partitioning for Performance Optimization and I just got a relevant customer case to illustrate it. First you need to understand how partitions work internally. Partitions are on the low level are separate table. This means when you’re doing lookup by partitioned key you will look [...]
Percona XtraBackup 1.4
November 22, 2010 By 10 Comments
Percona XtraBackup 1.4 is now available for download. Version 1.4 fixes problems related to incremental backups. If you do incremental backups, it’s strongly recommended that you upgrade to this release. Functionality Added or Changed Incremental backups have changed and now allow the restoration of full backups containing certain rollback transactions that previously caused problems. Please [...]
Why you can’t rely on a replica for disaster recovery
July 31, 2010 By 25 Comments
A couple of weeks ago one of my colleagues and I worked on a data corruption case that reminded me that sometimes people make unsafe assumptions without knowing it. This one involved SAN snapshotting that was unsafe. In a nutshell, the client used SAN block-level replication to maintain a standby/failover MySQL system, and there was [...]
Reasons for run-away main Innodb Tablespace
June 10, 2010 By 2 Comments
So you’re running MySQL With innodb_file_per_table option but your ibdata1 file which holds main (or system) tablespace have grown dramatically from its starting 10MB size. What could be the reason of this growth and what you can do about it ? There are few things which are always stored in main tablespace – these are [...]
Debugging problems with row based replication
May 6, 2010 By 12 Comments
MySQL 5.1 introduces row based binary logging. In fact, the default binary logging format in GA versions of MySQL 5.1 is ‘MIXED’ STATEMENT*; The binlog_format variable can still be changed per sessions which means it is possible that some of your binary log entries will be written in a row-based fashion instead of the [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
November 20, 2009 By 2 Comments
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
Recovery after DROP [ TABLE | DATABASE ]
July 19, 2009 By 4 Comments
In your recovery practice we often face the problem when data lost by execution DROP TABLE or DROP DATABASE statement. In this case even our InnoDB Data Recovery tool can’t help, as table / directory with files was deleted (if you have innodb-file-per-table). And the same for MyISAM, all .MYD / .MYI / .frm – [...]
Detailed review of Tokutek storage engine
April 28, 2009 By 21 Comments
(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 [...]
Limiting InnoDB Data Dictionary
February 11, 2009 By 13 Comments
One of InnoDB’s features is that memory allocated for internal tables definitions is not limited and may grow indefinitely. You may not notice it if you have an usual application with say 100-1000 tables. But for hosting providers and for user oriented applications ( each user has dedicated database / table) it is disaster. For [...]
Fix of InnoDB/XtraDB scalability of rollback segment
January 18, 2009 By 9 Comments
Recently I wrote about InnoDB scalability on 24-core box, and we made research of scalability problems in sysbench write workload (benchmark emulates intensive insert/delete queries). By our results the problem is in concurrency on rollback segment, which by default is single and all transactions are serialized accessing to segment. Fortunately InnoDB internally has mechanism to [...]
