May 23, 2013

Return of the Query Cache, win a Percona Live ticket

It’s Friday again, and time for another TGIF give-away of a Percona Live London ticket! But first, what’s new with the MySQL query cache? You may know that it still has the same fundamental architecture that it’s always had, and that this can cause scalability problems and locking, but there have been some important changes [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks

In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]

Shard-Query turbo charges Infobright community edition (ICE)

Shard-Query is an open source tool kit which helps improve the performance of queries against a MySQL database by distributing the work over multiple machines and/or multiple cores. This is similar to the divide and conquer approach that Hive takes in combination with Hadoop. Shard-Query applies a clever approach to parallelism which allows it to [...]

Performance problem with Innodb and DROP TABLE

I’ve been working with an application which does a lot of CREATE and DROP table for Innodb tables and we’ve discovered DROP TABLE can take a lot of time and when it happens a lot of other threads stall in “Opening Tables” State. Also contrary to my initial suspect benchmarking create/drop table was CPU bound [...]

Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list

I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]

Webinar: Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup

We’ve had such a large number of signups to our Migrating MyISAM to InnoDB webinar, that we decided to hold one more before the year is out: December, 8th 9AM PST: Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup.

Moving from MyISAM to Innodb or XtraDB. Basics

I do not know if it is because we’re hosting a free webinar on migrating MyISAM to Innodb or some other reason but recently I see a lot of questions about migration from MyISAM to Innodb. Webinar will cover the process in a lot more details though I would like to go over basics in [...]

Sharing an auto_increment value across multiple MySQL tables (revisited)

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Sharing an auto_increment value across multiple MySQL tables. In the comments, a few people wrote in to suggest alternative ways of implementing this.  I just got around to benchmarking those alternatives today across two large EC2 machines:

Impact of the sort buffer size in MySQL

The parameter sort_buffer_size is one the MySQL parameters that is far from obvious to adjust. It is a per session buffer that is allocated every time it is needed. The problem with the sort buffer comes from the way Linux allocates memory. Monty Taylor (here) have described the underlying issue in detail, but basically above [...]

Testing MySQL column stores

Recently I had the opportunity to do some testing on a large data set against two MySQL column-store storage engines. I’d like to note that this effort was sponsored by Infobright, but this analysis reflects my independent testing from an objective viewpoint. I performed two different types of testing. The first focused on core functionality [...]