As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic [...]
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. [...]
Intel SSD 910 vs HDD RAID in tpcc-mysql benchmark
I continue my benchmarks of Intel SSD 910, previous time I compared it with Fusion-io ioDrive http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/09/07/intel-ssd-910-in-tpcc-mysql-benchmark/. Now I want to test this card against RAID over spinning disks.
Join Optimizations in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the third blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is targeted at the join related optimizations introduced in the optimizer. These optimizations are available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5, and MariaDB 5.5 [...]
Testing the Group Commit Fix
As you may know, Kristian Nielsen made a fix for the Group Commit Problem which we many times wrote about. The fix came into MariaDB 5.3 and Mark Callaghan tested it recently . We ported this patch to Percona Server (it is not in the main branch yet), and here are the results of my [...]
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 [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Theory
Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at [...]
Impact of the number of idle connections in MySQL
Be careful with my findings, I appear to have compile in debug mode, I am redoing the benchmarks. Updated version here. I recently had to work with many customers having large number of connections opened in MySQL and although I told them this was not optimal, I had no solid arguments to present. More than [...]
XtraDB feature: save / restore buffer pool
We recently released XtraDB-9, and while we did not highlight it in announcement, the release-making feature is ability to save and restore InnoDB buffer pool. The idea is not new and was originally developed by Jeremy Cole (sorry, I do not have the link on hands) some time ago, and now we implemented it in [...]
Fast storage: 8 SSD Intel X-25M 80GB benchmarks
I appreciate opportunity Jos van Dongen from Tholis Consulting gave me. He granted me access to servers with 8 attached Intel X-25M 80GB MLC cards. The cards attached to 2 Adaptec 5805 raid controllers, with 4 cards per controller. The cost of setup is 8 x 260$ (X-25M) + 2×500$ (Adaptec 5805) = ~3000$. Available [...]

