The Percona Toolkit team is happy to announce the release of Percona Toolkit version 2.1.4. This is the fourth stable release in the 2.1 series, and primarily a bug-fix release; We suggest that users upgrade to the latest version of the tools. The complete list of changes is on the Launchpad milestone for 2.1.4, but [...]
Find unused indexes
I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.1 with New Online Schema Change Tool
I’m proud to announce the GA release of version 2.1 of Percona Toolkit. Percona Toolkit is the essential suite of administrative tools for MySQL. With this release we introduce a new version of pt-online-schema-change, a tool that enables you to ALTER large tables with no blocking or downtime. As you know, MySQL locks tables for [...]
Faster Point In Time Recovery with LVM2 Snaphots and Binary Logs
LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
MySQL Configuration Wizard Updated
We’ve released an updated version of the MySQL Configuration Wizard we announced at the end of last year. If you don’t remember that announcement, here’s the short version: this is a tool to help you generate my.cnf files based on your server’s hardware and other characteristics. We’ve gotten really good feedback on this tool, including [...]
Helgrinding MySQL with InnoDB for Synchronisation Errors, Fun and Profit
It is no secret that bugs related to multithreading–deadlocks, data races, starvations etc–have a big impact on application’s stability and are at the same time hard to find due to their nondeterministic nature. Any tool that makes finding such bugs easier, preferably before anybody is aware of their existence, is very welcome.
Shard-Query EC2 images available
Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]
Using Flexviews – part two, change data capture
In my previous post I introduced materialized view concepts. This post begins with an introduction to change data capture technology and describes some of the ways in which it can be leveraged for your benefit. This is followed by a description of FlexCDC, the change data capture tool included with Flexviews. It continues with an [...]
Basic performance and diagnostic tools on Solaris
Much has been written about tools to inspect Linux systems, and much has been written about Solaris’s Big Important Tools such as DTrace. But I don’t recall seeing much in the MySQL blogs about basic tools to find one’s way around a Solaris system and discover the system, get fundamental performance, configuration, and status information, [...]
Logging MySQL queries from the client instead of the server
The “slow query log” is the single most valuable way to examine query execution on your MySQL server. Queries are logged with timing information, and in the case of Percona Server, a great deal of additional performance and other diagnostic information. But the execution time recorded in the log is the time the query took [...]

