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 [...]
table_cache negative scalability
Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]
What to do with MySQL Full Text Search while migrating to Innodb ?
It is rather typical for systems to start as MyISAM but as system growths to move to Innodb. The reason of the move could be just desire for better data consistency guaranty or being bitten repairing multiple GB MyISAM table few times, though Table Locks is probably the most important issue – with modern multi [...]
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
Announcing Percona Training Workshops for InnoDB and XtraDB
Today, we are announcing that we’re ready to offer training for InnoDB and XtraDB in Santa Clara and San Francisco. The course was developed by Morgan Tocker with input from all our team – and covers a lot of the performance problems we run through in our consulting practice. The Details: 14th Sept – Santa [...]
Just how useful are binary logs for incremental backups?
We’ve written about replication slaves lagging behind masters before, but one of the other side effects of the binary log being serialized, is that it also limits the effectiveness of using it for incremental backup. Let me make up some numbers for the purposes of this example: We have 2 Servers in a Master-Slave topology. [...]
Improving InnoDB recovery time
Speed of InnoDB recovery is known and quite annoying problem. It was discussed many times, see: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=29847 http://dammit.lt/2008/10/26/innodb-crash-recovery/ This is problem when your InnoDB crashes, it may takes long time to start. Also it affects restoring from backup (both LVM and xtrabackup / innobackup) In this is simple test, I do crash mysql during in-memory [...]
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, [...]
When would you use SAN with MySQL ?
One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?
Announcing Percona Performance Conference 2009 on April 22 & 23
…any sessions this year; Peter, Vadim, and the rest of us at Percona submitted over a dozen session proposals, which were initially declined. As …Cabral is organizing.
That’s the back story — now on to the Percona Performance Conference! This is not “another MySQL conference.” It’s a performance…to Santa Clara.
We will not be the only ones speaking at Percona Performance Conference; other experts will join us in making presentations too. …to propose a session, please do so through the Percona Performance Conference website.
The Percona team looks forward to greeting you face to face …

