Traditionally the most benchmarks are focusing on throughput. We all get used to that, and in fact in our benchmarks, sysbench and tpcc-mysql, the final result is also represents the throughput (transactions per second in sysbench; NewOrder transactions Per Minute in tpcc-mysql). However, like Mark Callaghan mentioned in comments, response time is way more important [...]
dbqp and Xtrabackup testing
So I’m back from the Percona dev team’s recent meeting. While there, we spent a fair bit of time discussing Xtrabackup development. One of our challenges is that as we add richer features to the tool, we need equivalent testing capabilities. However, it seems a constant in the MySQL world that available QA tools often [...]
Improved InnoDB fast index creation
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 [...]
Shard-Query turbo charges Infobright community edition (ICE)
Shard-Query is an open source tool kit which helps improve the performance of queries against a MySQL database by distributing the work over multiple machines and/or multiple cores. This is similar to the divide and conquer approach that Hive takes in combination with Hadoop. Shard-Query applies a clever approach to parallelism which allows it to [...]
InnoDB page sizes: plans and ideas
It is well known fact that InnoDB standard page size is 16K or 16384 bytes. Sometime ago we added feature to Percona Server to change that to 4K or 8K (innodb_page_size). That maybe useful for SSD that operates with 4K blocks and you can get really much better throughput with 4K ( however we need [...]
The story of one MySQL Upgrade
I recently worked on upgrading MySQL from one of very early MySQL 5.0 versions to Percona Server 5.1. This was a classical upgrade scenario which can cause surprises. Master and few slaves need to be upgraded. It is a shared database used by tons of applications written by many people over more than 5 years [...]
State of the art: Galera – synchronous replication for InnoDB
First time I heard about Galera on Percona Performance Conference 2009, Seppo Jaakola was presenting “Galera: Multi-Master Synchronous MySQL Replication Clusters”. It was impressed as I personally always wanted it for InnoDB, but we had it in plans at the bottom of the list, as this is very hard to implement properly. The idea by [...]
Quick comparison of MyISAM, Infobright, and MonetDB
Recently I was doing a little work for a client who has MyISAM tables with many columns (the same one Peter wrote about recently). The client’s performance is suffering in part because of the number of columns, which is over 200. The queries are generally pretty simple (sums of columns), but they’re ad-hoc (can access [...]
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 [...]
10 things you need to know about backup solutions for MySQL
Are you using someone else’s backup solution for your MySQL data? Do you care a lot about your data? Are you sure you’re getting a reliable, recoverable backup that’ll work for your business and your application, and won’t impact your critical processes while it runs? Here are ten questions you need to be able to [...]

