This blog post is part two in what is now a continuing series on the Star Schema Benchmark. In my previous blog post I compared MySQL 5.5.30 to MySQL 5.6.10, both with default settings using only the InnoDB storage engine. In my testing I discovered that innodb_old_blocks_time had an effect on performance of the benchmark. There was [...]
Galera Flow Control in Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL
Last week at Percona Live, I delivered a six-hour tutorial about Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL. I actually had more material than I covered (by design), but one thing I regret we didn’t cover was Flow control. So, I thought I’d write a post covering flow control because it is important to understand. What [...]
The write cache: Swap insanity tome III
Swapping has always been something bad for MySQL performance but it is even more important for HA systems. It is so important to avoid swapping with HA that NDB cluster basically forbids calling malloc after the startup phase and hence its rather complex configuration. Probably most readers of this blog know (or should know) about [...]
Disconnecting a replication slave is easier with MySQL 5.5+ (RESET SLAVE vs. RESET SLAVE ALL)
It’s not uncommon to promote a server from slave to master. One of the key things to protect your data integrity is to make sure that the promoted slave is permanently disconnected from its old master. If not, it may get writes from the old master, which can cause all kinds of data corruption. MySQL [...]
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. [...]
How Can Percona MySQL Server Development Services Help ?
At Percona we offer a number of services. One of them, Custom MySQL Server Development, is commonly the most misunderstood and undervalued. There are a lot of ways Percona custom MySQL server development can help your business be more successful with MySQL. Here are some ways: Bugs – There are Bugs in MySQL, Percona Server, [...]
Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif
There are times where you need to know exactly how much memory the mysqld server (or any other program) is using, where (i.e. for what function) it was allocated, how it got there (a backtrace, please!), and at what point in time the allocation happened. For example; you may have noticed a sharp memory increase [...]
Get Me Some Query Logs!
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 [...]
Review of MySQL 5.6 Defaults Changes
James Day just posted the great summary of defaults changes in MySQL 5.6 compared to MySQL 5.5 In general there are a lot of good changes and many defaults are now computed instead of hardcoded. Though some of changes are rather puzzling for me. Lets go over them: back_log = 50 + ( max_connections / [...]
Time for Zero Administration effort at MySQL ?
Preparing Optimizing MySQL Configuration talk for Percona Live in Washington,DC I noticed how many Variables did MySQL get over years – it is pushing 400 these days even if we do not count variables/options which do not have matching SHOW VARIABLES value, and settings done by changing tables rather than command line options (like much [...]

