May 23, 2013

Percona MySQL University comes to Toronto on March 22

Following our events in Raleigh, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Percona MySQL University comes to Toronto on March 22nd. This is going to our most dense event yet, absolutely packed with information. Even though we have just 1 track we have 12 talks and 11 speakers. We had unique opportunity this time because Percona’s Consulting, Support, RemoteDBA, [...]

Adventures in archiving

One of our Remote DBA service clients recently had an issue with size on disk for a particular table; in short this table was some 25 million rows of application audit data with an on disk size of 345GB recorded solely for the purposes of debugging which may or may not occur. Faced with the task of [...]

MySQL 5.6: Improvements in the Nutshell

Preparing for my talk for Percona MySQL University in Raleigh,NC, Tuesday 29th of January I have created the outline of improvements available in MySQL 5.6 which I thought was worth sharing to give a feel for how massive work have been done for this release in variety of areas. I’m sure the list is not [...]

Is there room for more MySQL IO Optimization?

I prefer to run MySQL with innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT in most cases – it makes sure there is no overhead of double buffering and I can save the limited amount of file system cache I would normally have on database server for those things which need to be cached — system files, binary log, FRM files, MySQL [...]

The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection

Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]

Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)

I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding.  They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]

L2 cache for MySQL

The idea to use SSD/Flash as a cache is not new, and there are different solutions for this, both OpenSource like L2ARC for ZFS and Flashcache from Facebook, and proprietary, like directCache from Fusion-io. They all however have some limitations, that’s why I am considering to have L2 cache on a database level, as an [...]

Review of MySQL 5.6 Defaults Changes

James Day just posted the great summary of defaults changes in MySQL 5.6 compared to MySQL 5.5 In general there are a lot of good changes and many defaults are now computed instead of hardcoded. Though some of changes are rather puzzling for me. Lets go over them: back_log = 50 + ( max_connections / [...]

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 [...]

Adaptive flushing in MySQL 5.6 – cont

This is to continue my previous experiments on adaptive flushing in MySQL 5.6.6. Now I am running Ubuntu 12.04, which seems to provide a better throughput than previous system (CentOS 6.3), it also changes the profile of results. So, as previous I run tpcc-mysql 2500W, against MySQL 5.6.6 with innodb_buffer_pool_size 150GB, and now I vary [...]