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. [...]
Using MySQL Sandbox with Percona Server
One of the most useful tools if you’re working with multiple versions of MySQL Servers is MySQL Sandbox which allows you to maintain many different versions of MySQL, Percona Server, MariaDB. If you’re just working with single sandbox you can just use MySQL Sandbox in its most basic way and it will work:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 | root@smt2:~/sandboxes# make_sandbox /tmp/Percona-Server-5.5.29-rel29.4-401.Linux.x86_64.tar.gz unpacking /tmp/Percona-Server-5.5.29-rel29.4-401.Linux.x86_64.tar.gz Executing low_level_make_sandbox --basedir=/tmp/5.5.29 \ --sandbox_directory=msb_5_5_29 \ --install_version=5.5 \ --sandbox_port=5529 \ --no_ver_after_name \ --my_clause=log-error=msandbox.err ... no_run = no_show = do you agree? ([Y],n) Y loading grants ... sandbox server started Your sandbox server was installed in $HOME/sandboxes/msb_5_5_29 |
However [...]
Read/Write Splitting with PHP Webinar Questions Followup
Today I gave a presentation on “Read/Write Splitting with PHP” for Percona Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as I could during the session, but here are [...]
Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)
I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding. They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]
Minimizing Downtime from Lengthy AWS Outages
Well, it happened again… Another lengthy EBS outage in the US-East region impacted several sites across the net. While failures like this are rare, they can be quite costly and translate into headaches for the operations team when impact production systems for any length of time. At Percona, we routinely help clients architect and deploy [...]
Hidden columns of query_review_history table
You can use pt-query-digest to process a MySQL slow query log and store historical values for review trend analysis into query_review_history table. According to its official documentation you can populate many columns in that table but there are other important ones such as ‘user’, ‘host’, ‘db’ which are not included by default. I will explain [...]
SQL Injection Questions Followup
I presented a webinar today about SQL Injection, to try to clear up some of the misconceptions that many other blogs and articles have about this security risk. You can register for the webinar even now that I’ve presented it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording, which will be available soon. During [...]
Why don’t our new Nagios plugins use caching?
In response to the release of our new MySQL monitoring plugins on Friday, one commenter asked why the new Nagios plugins don’t use caching. It’s worth answering in a post rather than a comment, because there is an important principle that needs to be understood to monitor servers correctly. But first, some history. When I [...]
The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages
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 [...]
Is your MySQL Application having Busy IO by Oracle Measures ?
Preparing Choosing Storage Systems for MySQL talk for Percona Live in Washington,DC I ran into great paper called Sane SAN 2010 by James Morle from Scale Abilities – and Oracle consulting company. It is worth to read for variety of reason yet for this post I wanted to mention what James calls “Busy” Oracle database [...]

