May 24, 2013

Webinar: Best Practices for MySQL Scalability on May 1

If you have not already done so, I encourage you to register for my “Best Practices for MySQL Scalability” Webinar which will take place on May 1st at 10 a.m. PST. This will be an overview presentation, led by me and providing a high-level look at the components of MySQL scalability: application architecture, MySQL version [...]

Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO

Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]

Announcing Percona Live MySQL London

Looking for a great opportunity to share your MySQL knowledge with the MySQL community? Here is your chance. Percona is happy to announce that the dates of the Percona Live MySQL London Conference have been set for Dec. 3-4, 2012. Call for speakers is underway and will be open until August 17th, 2012. The conference [...]

Return of the Query Cache, win a Percona Live ticket

It’s Friday again, and time for another TGIF give-away of a Percona Live London ticket! But first, what’s new with the MySQL query cache? You may know that it still has the same fundamental architecture that it’s always had, and that this can cause scalability problems and locking, but there have been some important changes [...]

MySQL performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS

A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts [...]

How Innodb Contention may manifest itself

Even though multiple fixes have been implemented in Percona Server and MySQL 5.5, there are still workloads in which case mutex (or rw-lock) contention is a performance limiting factor, helped by ever growing number of cores available in the systems. It is interesting though the contention may manifest itself in the different form from the [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks

In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]

How Percona strives to remain neutral and independent

Many of the prominent companies in the MySQL ecosystem are Percona customers, including hardware manufacturers, software developers, hosted service providers, and appliance developers. We perform paid and unpaid research on their products, and we publish blog posts related to their products or services. Independence and objectivity are core Percona values. How do we balance the [...]

Percona Server Scales Vertically with Virident tachIOn Drives

We’ve published a new white paper that explains how to stop sharding and start scaling vertically with PCI-E flash drives, specifically the Virident tachIOn drive, which offers consistent, low-latency IO performance. I’ve been beating this drum for a while, so it’s a great feeling to have an explicitly recommended reference architecture: buy flash storage first, [...]

Basic performance and diagnostic tools on Solaris

Much has been written about tools to inspect Linux systems, and much has been written about Solaris’s Big Important Tools such as DTrace. But I don’t recall seeing much in the MySQL blogs about basic tools to find one’s way around a Solaris system and discover the system, get fundamental performance, configuration, and status information, [...]