One of my favorite tools in the Percona Toolkit is pt-query-digest. This tool is indispensable for identifying your top SQL queries, and analyzing which queries are accounting for your database load. But the report you get from pt-query-digest is only as good as the log of queries you give it as input. You need a large [...]
Replaying database load with Percona Playback
If you are planning to upgrade or make any configuration change on your MySQL database the first advice usually is: – Benchmark! How should we do that benchmark? People usually run generic benchmark tools like sysbench, tpcc or mysqlslap that are good to know the number of transactions per seconds that a database can do [...]
DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL
Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]
Identifying the load with the help of pt-query-digest and Percona Server
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 [...]
Optimizing slow web pages with mk-query-digest
I don’t use many tools in my consulting practice but for the ones I do, I try to know them as best as I can. I’ve been using mk-query-digest for almost as long as it exists but it continues to surprise me in ways I couldn’t imagine it would. This time I’d like to share [...]
Percona Server 5.1.53-12.4
Percona Server version 5.1.53-12.4 is now available for download. It is now the current stable release version. Functionality Added or Changed  Percona Server 5.1.53-12.4 is based on MySQL 5.1.53.  New Features Added: Precompiled UDFs for Maatkit (FNV and MurmurHash hash functions to provide faster checksums) are now included in distributions. Fixes feature request #689992. (Aleksandr Kuzminsky) [...]
Estimating Replication Capacity
It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to optimize your system when your replication runs [...]
Percona Server 5.1.47-rel11.0
Dear Community, Percona Server version 5.1.47-rel11.0 is available for download now. The changes in this release include: New features Percona Server is now based on MySQL 5.1.47, and XtraDB is now based on InnoDB plugin 1.0.8. XtraDB now uses the fast recovery code released in InnoDB Plugin version 1.0.8, instead of Percona’s earlier fast-recovery code. [...]
Poor man’s query logging
Occasionally there is a need to see what queries reach MySQL. The database provides several ways to share that information with you. One is called general log activated with
1 | --log |
(or
1 | --general-log |
in MySQL 5.1+) start-up parameter. The log writes any query being executed by MySQL to a file with limited amount of additional information. [...]
Updated msl (microslow) patch, installation walk-through!
For a couple of months there have been no updates to our msl patch, however recently I managed some time to change this. The functionality was extended a little bit and what’s even more important the patch is available for all the recent MySQL releases. To remind anyone who has not yet come across this [...]

