I recently had to do some customer work involving the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin and would like to share my experience in this post. Auditing user activity in MySQL has traditionally been challenging. Most data can be obtained from the slow or general log, but this involves a lot of data you don’t need too, and [...]
MySQL 5.6 – InnoDB Memcached Plugin as a caching layer
March 29, 2013 By 10 Comments
A common practice to offload traffic from MySQL 5.6 is to use a caching layer to store expensive result sets or objects. Some typical use cases include: Complicated query result set (search results, recent users, recent posts, etc) Full page output (relatively static pages) Full objects (user or cart object built from several queries) Infrequently [...]
MySQL 5.6 Compatible Percona Toolkit 2.2 Released
March 25, 2013 By 2 Comments
A new Percona Toolkit series has been released: Percona Toolkit 2.2 for MySQL 5.6. Several months in the making and many new features, changes, and improvements make this a great new series. It replaces the 2.1 series for which we plan to do only one more bug fix release (as 2.1.10) then retire. 2.2 is [...]
Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif
January 9, 2013 By 1 Comment
There are times where you need to know exactly how much memory the mysqld server (or any other program) is using, where (i.e. for what function) it was allocated, how it got there (a backtrace, please!), and at what point in time the allocation happened. For example; you may have noticed a sharp memory increase [...]
Realtime stats to pay attention to in Percona XtraDB Cluster and Galera
November 26, 2012 By 4 Comments
I learn more and more about Galera every day. As I learn more, I try to keep my myq_gadgets toolkit up to date with what I consider is important to keep any eye on on a PXC node. In that spirit, I just today pushed some changes to the ‘wsrep’ report, and I thought I’d go over [...]
Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO
August 28, 2012 By 3 Comments
Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]
Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup
August 24, 2012 By 5 Comments
I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions. Here are their questions and my [...]
MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup
August 16, 2012 By 4 Comments
I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]
Find unused indexes
June 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]
ALTER TABLE: Creating Index by Sort and Buffer Pool Size
June 27, 2012 By 4 Comments
Today I was looking at the ALTER TABLE performance with fast index creation and without it with different buffer pool sizes. Results are pretty interesting. I used modified Sysbench table for these tests because original table as initially created only has index on column K which initially contains only zeros, which means index is very [...]
