Two notes for readers. First, we have been publishing a great deal of video material on our companion site Percona.TV. This includes our recordings from past conferences, user group meetings, screencasts, and most recently our webinars. (I hate the proprietary formats and silly technical restrictions that the webinar companies impose. I figured out how to [...]
Shard-Query adds parallelism to queries
November 15, 2010 By 18 Comments
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 [...]
Instrumentation and the cost of Foreign Keys
September 20, 2010 By 9 Comments
I occasionally get in to light arguments healthy discussions with students about whether or not to use Foreign Key constraints on InnoDB tables. My standard response has always been: “it depends on how much of a tradeoff you are willing to make for performance. In some situations the cost can be considerable”. .. that’s when [...]
Effect of adaptive_flushing
December 4, 2009 By 5 Comments
I recently had the chance to witness the effects of innodb_adaptive_flushing on the performance of InnoDB Plugin 1.0.5 in the wild, which Yasufumi wrote about previously here and here. The server in question was Solaris 10 with 8 disk RAID10 and 2 32GB SSDs used for ZIL and L2ARC, 72G RAM and 40G buffer pool. [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
November 20, 2009 By 2 Comments
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 [...]
Give me 8 hours, and I’ll help you build a better application
August 29, 2009 By 4 Comments
I have run into a number of cases recently that all had a similar look and feel. In most of these cases, the symptoms were very complicated, but they boiled down to just a few problems that can be prevented in very simple ways. If you are not doing any of the following three simple [...]
Faster MySQL failover with SELECT mirroring
February 1, 2009 By 9 Comments
One of my favorite MySQL configurations for high availability is master-master replication, which is just like normal master-slave replication except that you can fail over in both directions. Aside from MySQL Cluster, which is more special-purpose, this is probably the best general-purpose way to get fast failover and a bunch of other benefits (non-blocking ALTER [...]
Another scalability fix in XtraDB
January 23, 2009 By 13 Comments
Recent scalability fixes in InnoDB and also Google’s and your SMP fixes almost made InnoDB results acceptable in primary key lookups queries, but secondary indexes were forgotten for some time. Now having Dell PowerEdge R900 on board (16CPU cores, 16GB RAM) I have some time for experiments, and I played with queries
1 | SELECT name FROM sbtest WHERE country_id = ? LIMIT 5 |
MVCC: Transaction IDs, Log Sequence numbers and Snapshots
December 19, 2007 By 3 Comments
MySQL Storage Engines implementing Multi Version Concurrency Control have several internal identifiers related to MVCC. I see a lot of people being confused what they are and why they are needed so I decided to take a time to explain it a bit. This is general explanation, it does not corresponds to Innodb in particular [...]
Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I
October 26, 2007 By 19 Comments
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 [...]
