May 19, 2013

Why not make a tool to improve existing configurations?

A couple of users of our very popular MySQL Configuration Wizard have submitted feedback such as “I’d love to input my existing server settings and get suggestions on how to improve it.” This sounds like it would be great, doesn’t it? We’ve considered doing this, and even partially implemented it. But during our pre-release testing, [...]

Percona XtraDB Cluster Feature 2: Multi-Master replication

This is about the second great feature – Multi-Master replication, what you get with Percona XtraDB Cluster. It is recommended you get familiar with general architecture of the cluster, described on the previous post. By Multi-Master I mean the ability to write to any node in your cluster and do not worry that eventually you [...]

Which Linux distribution for a MySQL database server? A specific point of view.

One of the more common questions I get asked is which Linux distribution I would use for a MySQL database server. Bearing the responsibility for someone else’s success means I should advise something that is stable, reliable, easy to manage and has plenty of resources available online. It should also allow running MySQL without too [...]

What’s required to tune MySQL?

I got a serendipitous call (thanks!) yesterday asking what would be needed to tune[1] a database for better performance. It is a question that I hear often, but I never thought about answering it in public. Here’s a consolidated version of what I explained during our conversation.

Followup on performance metrics: slides, video

A while back, I wrote a two part post on how you can extract an amazing amount of information about a system’s performance, scalability, queueing, and more by just measuring request arrivals and completions, and the timestamps thereof. I promised to develop this into a more complete description of how to analyze MySQL’s performance and [...]

How InnoDB handles REDO logging

Xaprb (Baron) recently blogged about how InnoDB performs a checkpoint , I thought it might be useful to explain another important mechanism that affects both response time and throughput – The transaction log.

MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on Fast Flash card (Virident tachIOn)

This is to follow up on my previous post and show the results for MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on the fastest hardware I have in our lab: a Cisco UCS C250 server with 384GB of RAM, powered by a Virident tachIOn 400GB SLC card. To see different I/O patterns, I used different innodb_buffer_pool_size settings: 13G, [...]

How well does your table fits in innodb buffer pool ?

Understanding how well your tables and indexes fit to buffer pool are often very helpful to understand why some queries are IO bound and others not – it may be because the tables and indexes they are accessing are not in cache, for example being washed away by other queries. MySQL Server does not provide [...]

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 [...]

High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 1 – Intro

Like many, I have been seduced by the power and flexibility of Amazon EC2. Being able to launch new instances at will depending on the load, is almost too good to be true. Amazon has also some drawbacks, availability is not guaranteed and discovery protocols relying on Ethernet broadcast or multicast cannot be used. That [...]