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 [...]
MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup
August 16, 2012 By 4 Comments
I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
June 20, 2012 By 63 Comments
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
Binary log file size matters (sometimes)
May 24, 2012 By 6 Comments
I used to think one should never look at max_binlog_size, however last year I had a couple of interesting cases which showed that sometimes it may be very important variable to tune properly. I meant to write about it earlier but never really had a chance to do it. I have it now!
Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage
March 21, 2012 By 5 Comments
One of the most painful troubleshooting tasks with MySQL is troubleshooting memory usage. The problem usually starts like this – you have configured MySQL to use reasonable global buffers, such as innodb_buffer_size, key_buffer_size etc, you have reasonable amount of connections but yet MySQL takes much more memory than you would expect, causing swapping or other [...]
How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins
February 22, 2012 By 11 Comments
In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]
The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages
February 17, 2012 By 10 Comments
This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship. Some basic facts Most of us know that writing into Innodb updates buffer [...]
Identifying the load with the help of pt-query-digest and Percona Server
December 29, 2011 By 3 Comments
Overview Profiling, analyzing and then fixing queries is likely the most oft-repeated part of a job of a DBA and one that keeps evolving, as new features are added to the application new queries pop up that need to be analyzed and fixed. And there are not too many tools out there that can make [...]
MySQL performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS
August 4, 2011 By 11 Comments
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 [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks
June 9, 2011 By 13 Comments
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 [...]
