I am currently working with a large customer and I am involved with servers located in two data centers, one with Solaris servers and the other one with Linux servers. The Solaris side is cleverly setup using zones and ZFS and this provides a very low virtualization overhead. I learned quite a lot about these [...]
Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 2
This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]
Is Synchronous Replication right for your app?
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 [...]
MySQL and Percona Server in LinkBench benchmark
Around month ago Facebook has announced the Linkbench benchmark that models the social graph OLTP workload. Sources, along with a very nice description of how to setup and run this benchmark, can be found here. We decided to run this benchmark for MySQL Server 5.5.30, 5.6.11 and Percona Server 5.5.30 and check how these servers [...]
Benchmarking Percona Server TokuDB vs InnoDB
After compiling Percona Server with TokuDB, of course I wanted to compare InnoDB performance vs TokuDB. I have a particular workload I’m interested in testing – it is an insert-intensive workload (which is TokuDB’s strong suit) with some roll-up aggregation, which should produce updates in-place (I will use INSERT .. ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements [...]
More on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization
Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]
MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark
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. [...]
MySQL 5.6: Improvements in the Nutshell
Preparing for my talk for Percona MySQL University in Raleigh,NC, Tuesday 29th of January I have created the outline of improvements available in MySQL 5.6 which I thought was worth sharing to give a feel for how massive work have been done for this release in variety of areas. I’m sure the list is not [...]
Is there room for more MySQL IO Optimization?
I prefer to run MySQL with innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT in most cases – it makes sure there is no overhead of double buffering and I can save the limited amount of file system cache I would normally have on database server for those things which need to be cached — system files, binary log, FRM files, MySQL [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster – installation and setup webinar follow up Q&A
Thanks for all, who attended my webinar, I got many questions and I wanted to take this opportunity to answer them. Q: Even ntp has a delay of 0.3-0.4 between servers does that mean a 0.25 as from logs can be an issue ? A: My demo vms were running for a few hours before [...]

