I recently had to do some customer work involving the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin and would like to share my experience in this post. Auditing user activity in MySQL has traditionally been challenging. Most data can be obtained from the slow or general log, but this involves a lot of data you don’t need too, and [...]
Replication in MySQL 5.6: GTIDs benefits and limitations – Part 1
Global Transactions Identifiers are one of the new features regarding replication in MySQL 5.6. They open up a lot of opportunities to make the life of DBAs much easier when having to maintain servers under a specific replication topology. However you should keep in mind some limitations of the current implementation. This post is the [...]
Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 2
This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]
Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 1
(This is part one of a two part series) Over the past few weeks I have been looking at a preview release of Virident’s vCache software, which is a kernel module and set of utilities designed to provide functionality similar to that of FlashCache. In particular, Virident engaged Percona to do a usability and feature-set [...]
Is Synchronous Replication right for your app?
I talk with lot of people who are really interested in Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and mostly they are interested in PXC as a high-availability solution. But, what they tend not to think too much about is if moving from async to synchronous replication is right for their application or not. Facts about Galera replication [...]
MySQL and Percona Server in LinkBench benchmark
Around month ago Facebook has announced the Linkbench benchmark that models the social graph OLTP workload. Sources, along with a very nice description of how to setup and run this benchmark, can be found here. We decided to run this benchmark for MySQL Server 5.5.30, 5.6.11 and Percona Server 5.5.30 and check how these servers [...]
Follow these basics when migrating to Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL
Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these [...]
More on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization
Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]
Percona XtraBackup 2.1.0 for MySQL beta now available
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.0 for MySQL beta on April 22, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here. For this BETA release, we will not be making APT and YUM repositories available, just base deb and RPM packages This is an BETA quality release and is not [...]
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 [...]

