May 19, 2013

Is Synchronous Replication right for your app?

May 14, 2013 By 16 Comments

I talk with lot of people who are really interested in Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and mostly they are interested in PXC as a high-availability solution.  But, what they tend not to think too much about is if moving from async to synchronous replication is right for their application or not. Facts about Galera replication [...]

Filed Under: MySQL, Percona Software, XtraDB Cluster Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Is your MySQL buffer pool warm? Make it sweat!

April 16, 2013 By 6 Comments

Today’s blog post diving into the waters of the MySQL buffer pool is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog, and is Part 1 of 2. Thank you to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon for contributing to this project and post. We’ll be posting Part 2 on Thursday. I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL, Percona Software Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

March 11, 2013 By 7 Comments

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. [...]

Filed Under: MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

Fun with the MySQL pager command

January 21, 2013 By 6 Comments

Last time I wrote about a few tips that can make you more efficient when using the command line on Unix. Today I want to focus more on pager. The most common usage of pager is to set it to a Unix pager such as less. It can be very useful to view the result [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: ,

Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters

January 15, 2013 By 9 Comments

One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , ,

Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif

January 9, 2013 By 1 Comment

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL, Quality Assurance

Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do

November 1, 2012 By 1 Comment

pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex.  Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities.  Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs.  The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Percona Software Tagged With:

Replaying database load with Percona Playback

October 25, 2012 By 9 Comments

If you are planning to upgrade or make any configuration change on your MySQL database the first advice usually is: – Benchmark! How should we do that benchmark? People usually run generic benchmark tools like sysbench, tpcc or mysqlslap that are good to know the number of transactions per seconds that a database can do [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

Tools and Techniques for Index Design Webinar Questions Followup

October 4, 2012 By 5 Comments

I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of Tools and Techniques for Index Design. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. I’d like to invite folks who are interested in tools for query optimization to attend the new Percona [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL

When is MIN(DATE) != MIN(DATE) ?

September 4, 2012 By 5 Comments

Inspiration for this post is courtesy of a friend and former colleague of mine, Greg Youngblood, who pinged me last week with an interesting MySQL puzzle. He was running Percona Server 5.5.21 with a table structure that looks something like this:

When he ran this query:

The result came back as 2012-06-22 10:28:16. [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL
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