A common practice to offload traffic from MySQL 5.6 is to use a caching layer to store expensive result sets or objects. Some typical use cases include: Complicated query result set (search results, recent users, recent posts, etc) Full page output (relatively static pages) Full objects (user or cart object built from several queries) Infrequently [...]
MySQL Backup tools used by Percona Remote DBA for MySQL
As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic [...]
MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark
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. [...]
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 [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster – installation and setup webinar follow up Q&A
Thanks for all, who attended my webinar, I got many questions and I wanted to take this opportunity to answer them. Q: Even ntp has a delay of 0.3-0.4 between servers does that mean a 0.25 as from logs can be an issue ? A: My demo vms were running for a few hours before [...]
Recovery deleted ibdata1
Recently I had a case when a customer deleted the InnoDB main table space – ibdata1 – and redo logs – ib_logfile*. MySQL keeps InnoDB files open all the time. The following recovery technique is based on this fact and it allowed to salvage the database. Actually, the files were deleted long time ago – [...]
Faster Point In Time Recovery with LVM2 Snaphots and Binary Logs
LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Upgrade Performance Regressions
So lets say you upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to Percona Server 5.5 and instead of expected performance improvement you see your performance being worse. What should you do ? First if you followed MySQL upgrade best practices such as testing your workload with pt-upgrade the chances of this happening are rather slim. But lets assume [...]
Innodb vs MySQL index counts
I had a customer recently who a few strange errors in their mysqld.err log:
1 | [ERROR] Table database_name/table_name contains 8 indexes inside InnoDB, which is different from the number of indexes 7 defined in the MySQL |
This customer was running Percona Server 5.1 and they got this error on two tables during a maintenance window when they were adding indexes to the same tables. We had a suspicion that it had something to do with Fast [...]
Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0 on October 15, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.59, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.59-13.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all the [...]

