May 23, 2013

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 [...]

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 [...]

Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT

Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]

MySQL extensions for hosting

A few weeks ago I was asked to isolate some functionalities from Mark Callaghan’s MySQL patch bundle. They were extensions adding per-user and per-table accounting to the database, accessible with a new set of commands such as SHOW TABLE_STATISTICS, SHOW INDEX_STATISTICS and SHOW USER_STATISTICS. The first two can interest anyone to periodically check what data [...]

Hacking to make ALTER TABLE online for certain changes

Suppose you want to remove auto_increment from 100G table. No matter if it’s InnoDB or MyISAM, you’d usually ALTER TABLE huge_table CHANGE id id int(6) NOT NULL and then wait hours for table rebuild to complete. If you’re unlucky i.e. you have a lot of indexes and not too much RAM – you could end [...]

Falcon Storage Engine Design Review

Now as new MySQL Storage engine – Falcon is public I can write down my thought about its design, which I previously should have kept private as I partially got them while working for MySQL. These thought base on my understanding, reading docs, speaking to Jim, Monty, Arjen and other people so I might miss [...]