May 18, 2013

Percona Toolkit 2.0.4 released

Percona Toolkit version 2.0.4 is available for immediate download. This release fixes 25 bugs and is a bug-fix release only, with the exception of a minor new filtering option for pt-kill. The change log is available on Launchpad. There are links to the documentation, downloads, bug reporting system, and mailing list on the toolkit homepage. [...]

Identifying the load with the help of pt-query-digest and Percona Server

Overview Profiling, analyzing and then fixing queries is likely the most oft-repeated part of a job of a DBA and one that keeps evolving, as new features are added to the application new queries pop up that need to be analyzed and fixed. And there are not too many tools out there that can make [...]

Distributed Set Processing with Shard-Query

Can Shard-Query scale to 20 nodes? Peter asked this question in comments to to my previous Shard-Query benchmark. Actually he asked if it could scale to 50, but testing 20 was all I could due to to EC2 and time limits. I think the results at 20 nodes are very useful to understand the performance: [...]

Shard-Query turbo charges Infobright community edition (ICE)

Shard-Query is an open source tool kit which helps improve the performance of queries against a MySQL database by distributing the work over multiple machines and/or multiple cores. This is similar to the divide and conquer approach that Hive takes in combination with Hadoop. Shard-Query applies a clever approach to parallelism which allows it to [...]

How to use tcpdump on very busy hosts

Often I run into problems when trying to use mk-query-digest with tcpdump on “very” busy hosts. You might be thinking, “very busy is a relative and unquantifiable term,” and you’d be right, so I’ll phrase this differently. Let me give a little background to the problem first. Mk-query-digest tries to handle dropped or missing packets [...]

High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 4 – The instance restart script

This post is the fourth of a series that started here. From the previous of this series, we now have resources configured but instead of starting MySQL, Pacemaker invokes a script to start (or restart) the EC2 instance running MySQL. This blog post describes the instance restart script. Remember, I am more a DBA than [...]

Joining on range? Wrong!

The problem I am going to describe is likely to be around since the very beginning of MySQL, however unless you carefully analyse and profile your queries, it might easily go unnoticed. I used it as one of the examples in our talk given at phpDay.it conference last week to demonstrate some pitfalls one may [...]

Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge

The mistake I commonly see among MySQL users is how indexes are created. Quite commonly people just index individual columns as they are referenced in where clause thinking this is the optimal indexing strategy. For example if I would have something like AGE=18 AND STATE=’CA’ they would create 2 separate indexes on AGE and STATE [...]

A few administrative updates

I wanted to write a few administrative updates in one so I didn’t spam everyone’s feed readers too much. Here we go: We’ve had reports of some lost comments.  We reported this via Twitter a while ago, but thought it was fixed.  We’ll try and pay more attention to spam filtering, but we wanted to [...]

Gathering queries from a server with Maatkit and tcpdump

For the last couple of months, we’ve been quietly developing a MySQL protocol parser for Maatkit. It isn’t an implementation of the protocol: it’s an observer of the protocol. This lets us gather queries from servers that don’t have a slow query log enabled, at very high time resolution. With this new functionality, it becomes [...]