Preamble: On performance, workload and scalability: MySQL has always been focused on OLTP workloads. In fact, both Percona Server and MySQL 5.5.7rc have numerous performance improvements which benefit workloads that have high concurrency. Typical OLTP workloads feature numerous clients (perhaps hundreds or thousands) each reading and writing small chunks of data. The recent improvements to [...]
Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep
Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]
How is join_buffer_size allocated?
When examining MySQL configuration, we quite often want to know how various buffer sizes are used. This matters because some buffers (sort_buffer_size for example) are allocated to their full size immediately as soon as they are needed, but others are effectively a “max size” and the corresponding buffers are allocated only as big as needed [...]
Recover BLOB fields
For a long time long types like BLOB, TEXT were not supported by Percona InnoDB Recovery Tool. The reason consists in a special way InnoDB stores BLOBs. An InnoDB table is stored in a clustered index called PRIMARY. It must exist even if a user hasn’t defined the primary index. The PRIMARY index pages are [...]
Debugging problems with row based replication
MySQL 5.1 introduces row based binary logging. In fact, the default binary logging format in GA versions of MySQL 5.1 is ‘MIXED’ STATEMENT*; The binlog_format variable can still be changed per sessions which means it is possible that some of your binary log entries will be written in a row-based fashion instead of the [...]
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 [...]
Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB
Accidentally me and Baron played with InfoBright (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/09/29/quick-comparison-of-myisam-infobright-and-monetdb/) this week. And following Baron’s example I also run the same load against MonetDB. Reading comments to Baron’s post I tied to load the same data to LucidDB, but I was not successful in this. I tried to analyze a bigger dataset and I took public [...]
Statistics of InnoDB tables and indexes available in xtrabackup
If you ever wondered how big is that or another index in InnoDB … you had to calculate it yourself by multiplying size of row (which I should add is harder in the case of a VARCHAR – since you need to estimate average length) on count of records. And it still would be quite [...]
Detailed review of Tokutek storage engine
(Note: Review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) I had a chance to take look TokuDB (the name of the Tokutek storage engine), and run some benchmarks. Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there only few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box [...]
MySQL Binaries Percona build10
We made new binaries for MySQL 5.0.67 build 10 which include next fixes: We addressed concerns about potential logging and statistics overhead, so now you can fully turn on / off query statistics for microslow patch and user statistics in runtime. Next variables were added:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | | slow_query_log | ON | | slow_query_log_file | /var/lib/mysql/slow_query.log | for compatibility with MySQL 5.1 and | userstat_running | OFF | to control gathering of user statistics. |
With both slow_query_log = OFF and userstat_running = OFF [...]

