In preparing for this month’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, I’ve been reminiscing about the annual MySQL User Conference’s history – the 9 times it previously took place in its various reincarnations – and there are a lot of good things, fun things to remember. 2003 was the year that marked the first MySQL user conference [...]
Innodb Caching (part 2)
Few weeks ago I wrote about Innodb Caching with main idea you might need more cache when you think you are because Innodb caches data in pages, not rows, and so the whole page needs to be in memory even if you need only one row from it. I have created the simple benchmark which [...]
Reality of Innodb Caching
I have mentioned few times Innodb caches data in pages and even if you have working set consisting of relatively few rows your working set in terms of pages can be rather large. Now I came to do a little benchmark to show it in practice. I’m using standard “sbtest” with 10mil rows with data [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 2: The Binary Log
This is the second in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in certain circumstances (links: part 1). In the first part, I wrote about single-threaded replication. Upstream from the replicas is the primary, which enables replication by writing a so-called “binary log” of events that modify data in the server. The binary log is [...]
PBXT in tpcc-like benchmark
Finally I was able to run PBXT 1.0.11 pre-GA in tpcc-like workload, apparently there was bug with did not allow me to get the result earlier, and I am happy to see that PBXT team managed it. For initial runs I took tpcc 100 warehouses ( about 10GB of data) which fully fits into memory [...]
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 [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
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 [...]
Would you like to ask a question about PBXT?
In the next week, I’ll be interviewing Paul McCullagh, the architect behind the PBXT storage engine. If you have any questions for Paul, please post them here by Monday 16th November. Note: The idea for this interview was inspired by a previous interview with Heikki Tuuri – creator of InnoDB. You can see the answers [...]
XtraDB has been commited to MariaDB
If you do not follow MariaDB development, I want to head up XtraDB has been commited to MariaDB server and will be included in binary releases of MariaDB (scheduled on end of August – September) as replacement of InnoDB storage engine. MariaDB will also include PBXT storage engine, Sphinx storage engine and few our non-InnoDB [...]
Open Development vs Making a Big Splash
I find it very interesting how Sun does not get the very basic principle of true community Open Source development – you’ve got to give up on making a big splash. Traditional close source company often develop product in the secret and when it comes out as a surprise for computers and making a big [...]

