May 19, 2013

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 [...]

Xtrabackup, doing once…

After some sprint coding and testing I am more than happy to declare Xtrabackup getting into alpha stage. And alpha means more that we have some dirty hacks in code / not fully scripted builds / not fully tested all MySQL versions, but backups work just fine! I am able to backup our production box [...]

Should you move from MyISAM to Innodb ?

There is significant portion of customers which are still using MyISAM when they come to us, so one of the big questions is when it is feasible to move to Innodb and when staying on MyISAM is preferred ? I generally prefer to see Innodb as the main storage engine because it makes life much [...]

Recovering CREATE TABLE statement from .frm file

So lets say you have .frm file for the table and you need to recover CREATE TABLE statement for this table. In particular when we do Innodb Recovery we often get .frm files and some mess in the Innodb tablespace from which we have to get data from. Of course we could relay on old [...]

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

Living with backups

Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]

Recovering Innodb table Corruption

Assume you’re running MySQL with Innodb tables and you’ve got crappy hardware, driver bug, kernel bug, unlucky power failure or some rare MySQL bug and some pages in Innodb tablespace got corrupted. In such cases Innodb will typically print something like this: InnoDB: Database page corruption on disk or a failed InnoDB: file read of [...]

The tool I’ve been waiting for years

I’ve just been pointed to the nice tool which I was waiting for years to see. It is fincore – little perl script which allows you to see what pages of file are cached in OS memory. This is really cool.

Monty unviels Maria and starts Blogging

This weekend we’re hearing great news from Michael “Monty” Widenius – one of the Fathers of MySQL. Monty finally found a time to create his own blog with very descriptive name Monty Says. At the same time Monty finally announces Maria – the MyISAM successor storage engine he has been working for last few years. [...]

No more MySQL Crash Safe Replication in 5.0 ?

As you might know even if you’re only using Innodb tables your replication is not completely crash safe – if Slave MySQL Server crashes/power goes down it is likely for relay logs to run out of sync (they are not synced to the disk) plus position on the master which slave remembers becomes stale. During [...]