The idea to use SSD/Flash as a cache is not new, and there are different solutions for this, both OpenSource like L2ARC for ZFS and Flashcache from Facebook, and proprietary, like directCache from Fusion-io. They all however have some limitations, that’s why I am considering to have L2 cache on a database level, as an [...]
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 [...]
Logging Foreign Key errors
In the last blog post I wrote about how to log deadlock errors using Percona Toolkit. Foreign key errors have the same problems. InnoDB only logs the last error in the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS, so we need another similar tool in order to have historical data. pt-fk-error-logger This is a tool very [...]
Percona Toolkit version 2.1.4 released
The Percona Toolkit team is happy to announce the release of Percona Toolkit version 2.1.4. This is the fourth stable release in the 2.1 series, and primarily a bug-fix release; We suggest that users upgrade to the latest version of the tools. The complete list of changes is on the Launchpad milestone for 2.1.4, but [...]
Visualization tools for pt-query-digest tables
When you process MySQL slow query logs using pt-query-digest you can store samples of each query into query_review table and historical values for review trend analysis into query_review_history table. But it could be difficult to easily browse those tables without a good GUI tool. For the visual browsing of tables created by pt-query-digest you may [...]
Recovery after DROP & CREATE
In a very popular data loss scenario a table is dropped and empty one is created with the same name. This is because mysqldump in many cases generates the “DROP TABLE” instruction before the “CREATE TABLE”:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `actor`; /*!40101 SET @saved_cs_client = @@character_set_client */; /*!40101 SET character_set_client = utf8 */; CREATE TABLE `actor` ( `actor_id` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `first_name` varchar(45) NOT NULL, `last_name` varchar(45) NOT NULL, `last_update` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, PRIMARY KEY (`actor_id`), KEY `idx_actor_last_name` (`last_name`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=201 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8; /*!40101 SET character_set_client = @saved_cs_client */; |
If there were no subsequent CREATE TABLE the recovery would be trivial. Index_id of the PRIMARY index of [...]
Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance
MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
Find unused indexes
I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]
Find and remove duplicate indexes
Having duplicate keys in our schemas can hurt the performance of our database: They make the optimizer phase slower because MySQL needs to examine more query plans. The storage engine needs to maintain, calculate and update more index statistics DML and even read queries can be slower because MySQL needs update fetch more data to [...]
Meet Percona at Southeast Linux Fest
Percona will be at Southeast Linux Fest tomorrow and Saturday. We’re supporting the event, and we hope to meet you there. If you’ve never been, this is a great regional show that’s grown enormously in the last few years. Peter and I will both be speaking: Peter about optimizing MySQL configuration, and I will talk [...]

