Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]
Can we improve MySQL variable handling ?
MySQL Settings (also known as Server Variables) have interesting property. When you set variable in running server this change is not persisted in any way and server will be back to old value upon restart. MySQL also does not have option to re-read config file without restarting as some other software so approach to change [...]
Why not make a tool to improve existing configurations?
A couple of users of our very popular MySQL Configuration Wizard have submitted feedback such as “I’d love to input my existing server settings and get suggestions on how to improve it.” This sounds like it would be great, doesn’t it? We’ve considered doing this, and even partially implemented it. But during our pre-release testing, [...]
Percona Replication Manager, a solution for MySQL high availability with replication using Pacemaker
The content of this article is outdated, look here for more up to date information. Over the last year, the frustration of many of us at Percona regarding issues with MMM has grown to a level where we started looking at other ways of achieving higher availability using MySQL replication. One of the weakness of [...]
Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9 on August 12, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.58, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all [...]
What’s required to tune MySQL?
I got a serendipitous call (thanks!) yesterday asking what would be needed to tune[1] a database for better performance. It is a question that I hear often, but I never thought about answering it in public. Here’s a consolidated version of what I explained during our conversation.
Percona Server 5.5.13-20.4 Stable Release
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.13-20.4 on July 1st, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.13, Percona Server Percona Server 5.5.13-20.4 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all the details of the [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks
In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]
Win a free ticket to RailsConf!
I have one free ticket to give away to RailsConf next week in Baltimore! Post a comment to win, and if you aren’t the winner, I’ll give you a discount code for Percona Live as a consolation prize. Here’s the catch: you have to find at least one thing wrong with the following typical logrotate [...]
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 [...]

