One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER TABLE [...]
Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0 on October 15, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.59, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all the [...]
Percona Server 5.5.16-22.0
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.16-22.0 on October 14, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.16, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.16-22.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all the [...]
Preprocessing Data
There are many ways of improving response times for users. There are some people that spend a lot of time, energy and money on trying to have the application respond as fast as possible at the time when the users made the request. Those people may miss out on an opportunity to do some or [...]
MySQL performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS
A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks
In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]
Innodb row size limitation
I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.
How InnoDB handles REDO logging
Xaprb (Baron) recently blogged about how InnoDB performs a checkpoint , I thought it might be useful to explain another important mechanism that affects both response time and throughput – The transaction log.
Conflict Avoidance with auto_increment_increment and auto_increment_offset
A lot of people are running MySQL Master-Master replication pairs in Active-Passive mode for purpose of high availabilities using MMM or other solutions. Such solutions generally have one major problem – you have to be very carefully switching writes as if you do not do it atomically (such as some scripts continue to write to [...]
MySQL Partitioning – can save you or kill you
I wanted for a while to write about using MySQL Partitioning for Performance Optimization and I just got a relevant customer case to illustrate it. First you need to understand how partitions work internally. Partitions are on the low level are separate table. This means when you’re doing lookup by partitioned key you will look [...]

