We receive many requests for help with server stalls. They come under various names: lockup, freeze, sudden slowdown. When something happens only once or twice a day, it can be difficult to catch it in action. Unfortunately, this often leads to trial-and-error approaches, which can drag on for days (or even months), and cause a [...]
Percona Server 5.5.8 Beta Release
It’s finally here! Percona Server Percona Server 5.5.8-20.0 is now available for download. This is a beta release of Percona’s enhancements to the MySQL 5.5.8 server. Here are some highlights: Performance and scalability improvements throughout the server and storage engine Optimizations for flash storage such as SSD, Virident, and FusionIO Optimizations for cloud computing The [...]
Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep
Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]
Percona’s Commitments to MySQL Users
You probably saw the Twitter storm over Oracle’s pricing changes and InnoDB in the last few days. The fear about Oracle removing InnoDB from the free version of MySQL was baseless — it was just a misunderstanding. Still, in the years since MySQL has been acquired by Sun, and then by Oracle, many MySQL users [...]
Percona Launches New Support Option for MySQL
We’ve just announced a new support offering for MySQL. There’s a press release here, and product information page here. But what does this new service really mean for you, in practical terms? This is actually important — it will open up a range of new choices for you. I’ll explain two major points that matter [...]
Virident tachIOn: New player on Flash PCI-E cards market
(Note: The review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) In my talk on MySQL Conference and Expo 2010 “An Overview of Flash Storage for Databases” I mentioned that most likely there are other players coming soon. I actually was not aware about any real [...]
Percona Welcomes Morgan Tocker and Matt Yonkovit
The Percona team has kept on expanding. We are very pleased to announce the addition of Morgan Tocker and Matt Yonkovit!
Morgan has been with us for a while. Before joining Percona, Morgan worked as a Technical Instructor for MySQL (and then Sun Microsystems) in…1990′s as a DBA, System Administrator, and all around techie. Before joining Percona, Matt worked at MySQL and Sun Microsystems as a Solution Architect helping to…. He will be a valuable member of both our consulting and development teams.
Morgan and Matt, a big welcome — we are fortunate indeed that you’re…
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 [...]
How Percona Develops Open-Source Software
Percona has been building and contributing to open-source software since the company was founded, and individually we’ve been doing the same thing for many years. We think it’s a huge value for our customers and the community. We’re involved in a dozen or so open-source projects, but our three core efforts at the moment are [...]
Percona turns two today !
July 31st 2006 was my last day working for MySQL and August 1st I started what later was incorporated Percona with Vadim joining me September 1st as co-founder. Two years is a significant anniversary for any startup – surviving (and being profitable) for 2 years can be seen as validation of our business model and [...]

