I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]
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 [...]
table_cache negative scalability
November 16, 2009 By 23 Comments
Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]
Finding your MySQL High-Availability solution – Replication
November 13, 2009 By 6 Comments
In the last 2 blog posts about High Availability for MySQL we have introduced definitions and provided a list of ( questions that you need to ask yourself before choosing a HA solution. In this new post, we will cover what is the most popular HA solution for MySQL, replication.
What to do with MySQL Full Text Search while migrating to Innodb ?
September 10, 2009 By 12 Comments
It is rather typical for systems to start as MyISAM but as system growths to move to Innodb. The reason of the move could be just desire for better data consistency guaranty or being bitten repairing multiple GB MyISAM table few times, though Table Locks is probably the most important issue – with modern multi [...]
Innodb performance gotcha w Larger queries.
August 28, 2009 By 7 Comments
Couple of days ago I was looking for a way to improve update performance for the application and I was replacing single value UPDATE with multiple value REPLACE (though I also saw the same problem with INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE) As I went from 1 value to 3 or 10 in the batch performance [...]
Slow DROP TABLE
June 16, 2009 By 21 Comments
It is a known fact that ext3 is not the most efficient file system out there and for example file removals can be painfully slow and cause a lot of random I/O. However, as it turns out, it can sometimes have a much more severe impact on the MySQL performance that it would seem. When [...]
Impossible – possible, moving InnoDB tables between servers
June 8, 2009 By 9 Comments
This is probably the feature I missed most from early days when I started to use InnoDB instead of MyISAM. Since that I figured out how to survive without it, but this is first question I hear from customers who migrated from MyISAM to InnoDB – can I just copy .ibd files from one server [...]
Getting annoyed with MyISAM multiple key caches.
May 1, 2009 By 11 Comments
As I’ve wrote few times using multiple key caches is a great way to get CPU scalability if you’re using MyISAM. It is however very annoying – this feature really looks half baked to me. The problem with multiple key caches and mapping of tables to the different files is – there is no way [...]
Detailed review of Tokutek storage engine
April 28, 2009 By 21 Comments
(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 [...]
