May 21, 2013

10 years of MySQL User Conferences

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 [...]

Adventures in archiving

One of our Remote DBA service clients recently had an issue with size on disk for a particular table; in short this table was some 25 million rows of application audit data with an on disk size of 345GB recorded solely for the purposes of debugging which may or may not occur. Faced with the task of [...]

Announcing Percona Server 5.1.66-14.2

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.66-14.2 on January 15th, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.66, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.66-14.2 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]

Announcing Percona Server 5.5.28-29.2

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.28-29.2 on December 7th, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.28, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.28-29.2 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]

Percona Server tree with support of Fusion-io atomic writes and DirectFS

Not so long ago Fusion-io announced an SDK which provides direct API access to Fusion ioMemory(tm) in addition to providing a native filesystem (directFS) with a goal to avoid overhead from kernel and regular Linux filesystems: ext4 and xfs. This requires a support from application, it should use special calls for IO. With help from [...]

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

ALTER TABLE: Creating Index by Sort and Buffer Pool Size

Today I was looking at the ALTER TABLE performance with fast index creation and without it with different buffer pool sizes. Results are pretty interesting. I used modified Sysbench table for these tests because original table as initially created only has index on column K which initially contains only zeros, which means index is very [...]

Building Indexes by Sorting In Innodb (AKA Fast Index Creation)

Innodb can indexes built by sort since Innodb Plugin for MySQL 5.1 which is a lot faster than building them through insertion, especially for tables much larger than memory and large uncorrelated indexes you might be looking at 10x difference or more. Yet for some reason Innodb team has chosen to use very small (just [...]

Benchmarking single-row insert performance on Amazon EC2

I have been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and I have some interesting results that I wanted to share. I used a nice and effective tool iiBench which has been developed by Tokutek. Though the “1 billion row insert challenge” for which this tool was originally built is long over, [...]

Index Condition Pushdown in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 and its performance impact

I have been working with Peter in preparation for the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. We are taking a look at and benchmarking optimizer enhancements one by one. So in the same way this blog post is aimed at a new optimizer enhancement Index Condition Pushdown (ICP). Its available [...]