May 22, 2013

Percona Server and XtraBackup weekly news, February 26th

Percona Server has a new logo:

Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list

I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]

MySQL 5.5.8 – in search of stability

A couple of days ago, Dimitri published a blog post, Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5, which was  a response to my post, MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive. I will refer to Dimitri’s article as article [1]. As always, Dimitri has provided a very detailed and thoughtful article, and I strongly recommend reading if [...]

Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep

Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]

Replication of MEMORY (HEAP) Tables

Some Applications need to store some transient data which is frequently regenerated and MEMORY table look like a very good match for this sort of tasks. Unfortunately this will bite when you will be looking to add Replication to your environment as MEMORY tables do not play well with replication.

The Doom of Multiple Storage Engines

One of the big “Selling Points” of MySQL is support for Multiple Storage engines, and from the glance view it is indeed great to provide users with same top level SQL interface allowing them to store their data many different way. As nice as it sounds the in theory this benefit comes at very significant [...]

Missleading Innodb message on recovery

As I wrote about 2 years ago the feature of Innodb to store copy of master’s position in Slave’s Innodb tablespace got broken. There is a lot of discussions at the corresponding bug report while outcome of the fix remained uncertain for me (the bug is market duplicate while the bugs it seems to be [...]

READ-COMMITED vs REPETABLE-READ in tpcc-like load

Question what is better isolation level is poping up again and again. Recently it was discussed in InnoDB : Any real performance improvement when using READ COMMITED isolation level ? and in Repeatable read versus read committed for InnoDB . Serge in his post explains why READ COMMITED is better for TPCC load, so why [...]

Impossible – possible, moving InnoDB tables between servers

This is probably the feature I missed most from early days when I started to use InnoDB instead of MyISAM. Since that I figured out how to survive without it, but this is first question I hear from customers who migrated from MyISAM to InnoDB – can I just copy .ibd files from one server [...]

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 [...]