I was curious to check how Percona XtraDB Cluster behaves when it comes to MySQL replication latency — or better yet, call it data propagation latency. It was interesting to see whenever I can get stale data reads from other cluster nodes after write performed to some specific node. To test it I wrote quite a [...]
Read/Write Splitting with PHP Webinar Questions Followup
Today I gave a presentation on “Read/Write Splitting with PHP” for Percona Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as I could during the session, but here are [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
InnoDB’s gap locks
One of the most important features of InnoDB is the row level locking. This feature provides better concurrency under heavy write load but needs additional precautions to avoid phantom reads and to get a consistent Statement based replication. To accomplish that, row level locking databases also acquire gap locks. What is a Phantom Read A [...]
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 [...]
XtraDB storage engine release 1.0.2-3 (Spring edition) codename Sapporo
Today we announce release 1.0.2-3 of our XtraDB storage engine. Here is a list of enhancements: Move to MySQL 5.1.31 Scalability fix — ability to use several rollback segments Increasing the number of rseg may be helpful for CPU scale of write-intentional workloads. See benchmark results. Scalability fix — replaced page_hash mutex to page_hash read-write [...]
New SpecJAppServer results at MySQL and Sun.
As you likely have seen Sun has posted the new SpecJAppServer Results More information from Tom Daly can be found here These results are quite interesting for me as I worked on some of the previous SpecJAppServer Benchmarks several years ago while being employed by MySQL. These are great results, plus they can be relevant [...]
INSERT INTO … SELECT Performance with Innodb tables.
Everyone using Innodb tables probably got use to the fact Innodb tables perform non locking reads, meaning unless you use some modifiers such as LOCK IN SHARE MODE or FOR UPDATE, SELECT statements will not lock any rows while running. This is generally correct, however there a notable exception – INSERT INTO table1 SELECT * [...]

