May 22, 2013

A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins

MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]

btrfs – probably not ready yet

Every time I have a conversation on SSD, someone mentions btrfs filesystem. And usually it is colored as a solution that will solve all our problems, improve overall performance and SSD in particular, and it is a saviour. Of course it caught my curiosity and I decided to perform a benchmark similar to what I [...]

Testing STEC SSD MACH16 200GB SLC

Following my previous benchmark of Samsung 830, today I want to show results for STEC MACH16 SATA card, 200GB size, this card is based on SLC, and regarding STEC website, it is an enterprise grade storage.

Testing Samsung SSD SATA 256GB 830 – not all SSD created equal

I personally like PCIe based Flash, but from a pricing point our customers are looking for cheaper alternatives. SATA SSD is an options. There is many products based on MLC technology, and Intel 320 I would say is the most popular. I do not particularly like its write performance – I wrote about it before, [...]

ext4 vs xfs on SSD

As ext4 is a standard de facto filesystem for many modern Linux system, I am getting a lot of question if this is good for SSD, or something else (i.e. xfs) should be used. Traditionally our recommendation is xfs, and it comes to known problem in ext3, where IO gets serialized per i_node in O_DIRECT [...]

Benchmarks of Intel 320 SSD 600GB

I have a chance to test a system with Intel 320 SSD drives (NewRelic provided me with an access to the server), and compare performance with SAS hard drives.

How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins

In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]

The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages

This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship. Some basic facts Most of us know that writing into Innodb updates buffer [...]

Backing up binary log files with mysqlbinlog

Backing up binary logs are essential part of creating good backup infrastructure as it gives you the possibility for point in time recovery. After restoring a database from backup you have the option to recover changes that happend after taking a backup. The problem with this approach was that you had to do periodic filesystem [...]

Setting up XFS on Hardware RAID — the simple edition

There are about a gazillion FAQs and HOWTOs out there that talk about XFS configuration, RAID IO alignment, and mount point options.  I wanted to try to put some of that information together in a condensed and simplified format that will work for the majority of use cases.  This is not meant to cover every [...]