The use of tmpfs/ramfs as /tmp partition is a common trick to improve the performance of on-disk temporary tables. Servers usually have less RAM than disk space so those kind of partitions are very limited in size and there are some cases were we can run out of space. Let’s see one example. We’re running [...]
Announcing Percona Server 5.5.25a-27.1
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.25a-27.1 on July 21st, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.25a, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.25a-27.1 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]
Announcing Percona Server 5.5.24-26.0
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.24-26.0 on June 1st, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.24, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.24-26.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]
A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins
MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]
How FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK works with Innodb Tables
Many backup tools including Percona Xtrabackup, MyLVMBackup and others use FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK to temporary make MySQL read only. In many cases the period for which server has to be made read only is very short, just few seconds, yet the impact of FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK can be quite large because [...]
Best kept MySQLDump Secret
Many people use mysqldump –single-transaction to get consistent backup for their Innodb tables without making database read only. In most cases it works, but did you know there are some cases when you can get table entirely missing from the backup if you use this technique ? The problem comes from the fact how MySQL’s [...]
Multi Range Read (MRR) in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the second 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 aimed at the optimizer enhancement Multi Range Read (MRR). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 Now let’s take a look at [...]
How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins
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 [...]
Percona XtraBackup 1.6.4
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 1.6.4 on 19 December, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). These release notes are (as always) available from the online Percona XtraBackup documentation. This release is purely composed of bug fixes and is the current stable release of Percona XtraBackup. In this release we now [...]
Improved InnoDB fast index creation
One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER TABLE [...]

