Percona will be in Chicago and London the week of April 8th delivering two 2-day MySQL workshops. For our MPB readers, we are offering a 15% discount. Just use MPB15A when purchasing your tickets to one or both MySQL workshops. Scaling and Optimization for MySQL on Monday & Tuesday, April 8 & 9 This MySQL workshop [...]
Fun with the MySQL pager command
Last time I wrote about a few tips that can make you more efficient when using the command line on Unix. Today I want to focus more on pager. The most common usage of pager is to set it to a Unix pager such as less. It can be very useful to view the result [...]
Debugging MySQL SSL problems
This is not necessarily going to be a comprehensive post, but I learned somethings about MySQL SSL today that I thought would be worth sharing. I was setting up a PRM install for a customer and one of the requirements was SSL replication. In this particular case, I had setup PRM first, and then was [...]
Tools and Techniques for Index Design Webinar Questions Followup
I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of Tools and Techniques for Index Design. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. I’d like to invite folks who are interested in tools for query optimization to attend the new Percona [...]
Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance
MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
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 [...]
Multi Range Read (MRR) in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the second blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is aimed at the optimizer enhancement Multi Range Read (MRR). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 Now let’s take a look at [...]
Should we give a MySQL Query Cache a second chance ?
Over last few years I’ve been suggesting more people to disable Query Cache than to enable it. It can cause contention problems as well as stalls and due to coarse invalidation is not as efficient as it could be. These are however mostly due to neglect Query Cache received over almost 10 years, with very [...]
MySQL caching methods and tips
“The least expensive query is the query you never run.” Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding [...]
Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views
Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]

