After having reviewed the definition my the previous post (The definitions), the next step is to respond to some questions. Do you need MySQL High-Availability? That question is quite obvious but some times, it is skipped. It can also be formulated “What is the downtime cost of the service?”. In the cost, you need to [...]
Finding your MySQL High-Availability solution – The definitions
As my first contribution to the MySQL Performance Blog, I joined Percona at the beginning September, I chose to cover the various high-availability (HA) options available for MySQL. I have done dozen of MySQL HA related engagements while working for Sun/MySQL over the last couple of years using Heartbeat, DRBD and NDB cluster and I’ll [...]
Is DRBD the right choice for me?
It seems pretty common to find customers install DRBD for the wrong reasons. There are many pros/cons to compare DRBD to replication, but I’ve managed to cut down my spiel I give to customers to these two points: DRBD’s aim (assuming replication mode C) is to provide 100% consistency, and then as much uptime as [...]
KISS KISS KISS
When I visit customers quite often they tell me about number of creative techniques they heard on the conferences, read on the blogs, forums and Internet articles and they ask me if they should use them. My advice is frequently – do not. It is fun to be creative but creative solutions also means unproven [...]
Percona is hiring performance experts
Percona is hiring. We’ve added several experts recently and we’re growing at a fast but sustainable pace. The demand for our services is strong, and we have openings for more experts in the next couple of months. Let me explain a little about what we’re looking for at the moment. While we do have a [...]
Faster MySQL failover with SELECT mirroring
One of my favorite MySQL configurations for high availability is master-master replication, which is just like normal master-slave replication except that you can fail over in both directions. Aside from MySQL Cluster, which is more special-purpose, this is probably the best general-purpose way to get fast failover and a bunch of other benefits (non-blocking ALTER [...]
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]
MySQL Replication vs DRBD Battles
Well these days we see a lot of post for and against (more, more) using of MySQL and DRBD as a high availability practice. I personally think DRBD has its place but there are far more cases when other techniques would work much better for variety of reasons. First let me start with Florian’s comments [...]
Using MMM to ALTER huge tables
Few months ago, I wrote about a faster way to do certain table modifications online. It works well when all you want is to remove auto_increment or change ENUM values. When it comes to changes that really require table to be rebuilt – adding/dropping columns or indexes, changing data type, converting data to different character [...]

