May 22, 2013

Onsite and Remote – getting best of both worlds

At Percona we provide services both Onsite – visiting the customers and Remote – logging in to their systems or communicating via email,phone,instant messaging. We believe both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks and mixing them right way allows you to get your problems solved most efficient way.

Drilling down to the source of the problem

I had an interesting tuning case few days ago. The system serving high traffic using Innodb tables would be stalling every so often causing even very simple queries both reads and writes taking long time to complete, with progress almost paused (dropping from thousands to tens of queries per second). On the surface the problem [...]

Fighting MySQL Replication Lag

The problem of MySQL Replication unable to catch up is quite common in MySQL world and in fact I already wrote about it. There are many aspects of managing mysql replication lag such as using proper hardware and configuring it properly. In this post I will just look at couple of query design mistakes which [...]

How to load large files safely into InnoDB with LOAD DATA INFILE

Recently I had a customer ask me about loading two huge files into InnoDB with LOAD DATA INFILE. The goal was to load this data on many servers without putting it into the binary log. While this is generally a fast way to load data (especially if you disable unique key checks and foreign key [...]

Progress with ClickAider project

About three months ago I announced ClickAider to become available to general public. And I think it is about the time to write about the progress we have with this project for those who interested. The project generates decent interest and we have about 3000 sites Registered over this time, which I consider decent number [...]

Can Innodb Read-Ahead reduce read performance ?

I ran into pretty interesting behavior today. We needed to dump and reload large database and we had pretty good IO subsystem so we started number of mysqldump processes in parallel. Unlike in other case when we did load in parallel, dump in parallel did not increase IO rate significantly and we could still see [...]

Predicting how long data load would take

I had this question asked many times during last week, and there is really no easy answer. There are just way too many variables to consider especially while loading large schemas with a lot of different table structures. So which variables affect the load speed: Table Structure This one is tricky. The shorter rows you [...]

Innodb Fuzzy checkpointing woes

As you might know Innodb storage engines uses Fuzzy Checkpointing technique as part of it recovery strategy.  It is very nice approach which means database never needs to “stall” to perform total modified pages flush but instead flushing of dirty pages happens gradually in small chunks so database load is very even. This works great [...]