On February 10, We will be giving a webinar “Managing Big Data with Percona Server, XtraBackup and Tungsten”. This is joint Continuent and Percona Webinar with full description: Big data is a big problem for growing SaaS businesses and large web applications. In this webinar, we’ll teach you how to set up Percona Server, XtraBackup, [...]
Upcoming Webinar “Managing Big Data with Percona Server, XtraBackup and Tungsten”
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 [...]
Guidance for MySQL Optimizer Developers
I spend large portion of my life working on MySQL Performance Optimization and so MySQL Optimizer is quite important to me. For probably last 10 years I chased first Monty and later Igor with Optimizer complains and suggestions. Here are some general ideas which I think can help to make optimizer in MySQL, MariaDB or [...]
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]
Percona welcomes Ewen Fortune and Piotr Biel
Although we haven’t announced any new members in a while, the Percona team has continued to grow steadily behind the scenes. Our hiring policy is to have a few months’ provisional period to ensure the…, of course. Ewen has been a consultant and contractor before joining Percona, and has many years of experience in Oracle, MySQL, Unix systems ….
Piotr Biel lives in Poland, quite close to our other Polish team member (Maciek Dobrzanski). In his past as a system architect he … can do!
Ewen and Piotr, a very warm welcome to the Percona team from all of us, and we are so glad to …
Beware of MyISAM Key Cache mutex contention
Today I was working with the client loading data to MyISAM tables at very high rate. Hundreds of millions rows are loaded daily into single MySQL instance with bursts up to 100K of records/sec which need to be inserted (in the table with few indexes). It was good not all records had to go to [...]
Percona turns two today !
July 31st 2006 was my last day working for MySQL and August 1st I started what later was incorporated Percona with Vadim joining me September 1st as co-founder. Two years is a significant anniversary for any startup – surviving (and being profitable) for 2 years can be seen as validation of our business model and [...]
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]
Innodb Performance Optimization Basics
Interviewing people for our Job Openings I like to ask them a basic question – if you have a server with 16GB of RAM which will be dedicated for MySQL with large Innodb database using typical Web workload what settings you would adjust and interestingly enough most people fail to come up with anything reasonable. [...]
Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I
Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]

