During the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 the week before last, we quietly released Percona Toolkit 2.2.2 with a few bug fixes: pt-archiver –bulk-insert may corrupt data pt-heartbeat –utc –check always returns 0 pt-query-digest 2.2 prints unwanted debug info on tcpdump parsing errors pt-query-digest 2.2 prints too many string values Some tools don’t [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.2.2 released; bug fixes include pt-heartbeat & pt-archiver
MySQL 5.6 – InnoDB Memcached Plugin as a caching layer
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 [...]
Accessing Percona XtraDB Cluster nodes in parallel from PHP using MySQL asynchronous queries
This post is followup to Peter’s recent post, “Investigating MySQL Replication Latency in Percona XtraDB Cluster,” in which a question was raised as to whether we can measure latency to all nodes at the same time. It is an interesting question: If we have N nodes, can we send queries to nodes to be executed in [...]
Read/Write Splitting with PHP Webinar Questions Followup
Today I gave a presentation on “Read/Write Splitting with PHP” for Percona Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as I could during the session, but here are [...]
Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif
There are times where you need to know exactly how much memory the mysqld server (or any other program) is using, where (i.e. for what function) it was allocated, how it got there (a backtrace, please!), and at what point in time the allocation happened. For example; you may have noticed a sharp memory increase [...]
Percona Toolkit by example – pt-stalk
pt-stalk recipes: Gather forensic data about MySQL when a server problem occurs It happens to us all from time to time: a server issue arises that leaves you scratching your head. That’s when Percona Toolkit’s pt-stalk comes into play, helping you diagnose the problem by capturing diagnostic data that helps you pinpoint what’s causing the [...]
The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection
Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]
Replication of the NOW() function (also, time travel)
Notice the result of the NOW() function in the following query. The query was run on a real database server and I didn’t change the clock of the server or change anything in the database configuration settings.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | mysql> SELECT NOW(),SYSDATE(); +---------------------+---------------------+ | NOW() | SYSDATE() | +---------------------+---------------------+ | 1999-01-01 00:00:00 | 2012-11-29 05:50:03 | +---------------------+---------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) |
You may proceed to party like it is 1999. How can the NOW() function return a value [...]
Announcing Percona Server 5.6.6-60.1 Alpha
Percona is glad to announce the ALPHA release of Percona Server 5.6.6-60.1 on September 14, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the EXPERIMENTAL Percona Software Repositories, although currently only for RHEL/CentOS as we are working on ensuring compatibility with our Debian/Ubuntu packages). Based on MySQL 5.6.6, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.6.6-60.1 is the second ALPHA release in [...]
How to find MySQL queries worth optimizing ?
One question I often get is how one can find out queries which should be optimized. By looking at pt-query-digest report it is easy to find slow queries or queries which cause the large portion of the load on the system but how do we know whenever there is any possibility to make this query [...]

