When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]
Emulating global transaction ID with pt-heartbeat
Global transaction IDs are being considered for a future version of MySQL. A global transaction ID lets you determine a server’s replication position reliably, among other benefits. This is great when you need to switch a replica to another master, or any number of other needs. Sometimes you can’t wait for the real thing, but [...]
Shard-Query EC2 images available
Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]
Innodb Caching (part 2)
Few weeks ago I wrote about Innodb Caching with main idea you might need more cache when you think you are because Innodb caches data in pages, not rows, and so the whole page needs to be in memory even if you need only one row from it. I have created the simple benchmark which [...]
Percona Server 5.5.11-20.2 Stable Release
Percona Server 5.5.11-20.2 is now available for download, including an experimental build for MacOS. Released on April 28, 2011, it is the current stable release in the the 5.5 series. New Features HandlerSocket, a NoSQL plugin for MySQL, has been updated to the latest stable version as April 11th, 2011. InnoDB fast index creation now [...]
Drop table performance
There have been recent discussions about DROP TABLE performance in InnoDB. (You can refer to Peter’s post http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/02/03/performance-problem-with-innodb-and-drop-table/ and these bug reports: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=51325 and http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=56332.) It may not sound that serious, but if your workload often uses DROP TABLE and you have a big buffer pool, it may be a significant issue. This can get [...]
InnoDB Flushing: Theory and solutions
I mentioned problems with InnoDB flushing in a previous post. Before getting to ideas on a solution, let’s define some terms and take a look into theory. The two most important parameters for InnoDB performance are innodb_buffer_pool_size and innodb_log_file_size. InnoDB works with data in memory, and all changes to data are performed in memory. In [...]
Performance problem with Innodb and DROP TABLE
I’ve been working with an application which does a lot of CREATE and DROP table for Innodb tables and we’ve discovered DROP TABLE can take a lot of time and when it happens a lot of other threads stall in “Opening Tables” State. Also contrary to my initial suspect benchmarking create/drop table was CPU bound [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]
MySQL 5.5.8 – in search of stability
A couple of days ago, Dimitri published a blog post, Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5, which was a response to my post, MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive. I will refer to Dimitri’s article as article [1]. As always, Dimitri has provided a very detailed and thoughtful article, and I strongly recommend reading if [...]

