So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload. I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins. I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table. The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]
Realtime stats to pay attention to in Percona XtraDB Cluster and Galera
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 [...]
Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance
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 [...]
MySQL performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS
A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts [...]
What’s required to tune MySQL?
I got a serendipitous call (thanks!) yesterday asking what would be needed to tune[1] a database for better performance. It is a question that I hear often, but I never thought about answering it in public. Here’s a consolidated version of what I explained during our conversation.
InnoDB Flushing: a lot of memory and slow disk
You may have seen in the last couple of weekly news posts that Baron mentioned we are working on a new adaptive flushing algorithm in InnoDB. In fact, we already have three such algorithms in Percona Server (reflex, estimate, keep_average). Why do we need one more? Okay, first let me start by showing the current [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
Living with backups
Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]
Rendundant Array of Inexpensive Servers
So you need to design highly available MySQL powered system… how do you approach that ? Too often I see the question is approached by focusing on expensive hardware which in theory should be reliable. And this really can work quite well for small systems. It is my experience – with quality commodity hardware (Dell,HP,IBM [...]


mk-query-digest, query comments and the query cache
I very much like the fact that MySQL allows you to embed comments into SQL statements. These comments are extremely convenient, because they are written into MySQL log files as part of the query. This includes the general log, the binary log and the slow query log. Maatkit includes tools which interact with these logs, [...]