May 18, 2013

Shard-Query EC2 images available

Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]

Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views

Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]

Modeling MySQL Capacity by Measuring Resource Consumptions

There are many angles you can look at the system to predict in performance, the model baron has published for example is good for measuring scalability of the system as concurrency growths. In many cases however we’re facing a need to answer a question how much load a given system can handle when load is [...]

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 [...]

Checking for a live database connection considered harmful

It is very common for me to look at a customer’s database and notice a lot of overhead from checking whether a database connection is active before sending a query to it. This comes from the following design pattern, written in pseudo-code:

Many of the popular development platforms do something similar to this. Two [...]

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

MySQL extensions for hosting

A few weeks ago I was asked to isolate some functionalities from Mark Callaghan’s MySQL patch bundle. They were extensions adding per-user and per-table accounting to the database, accessible with a new set of commands such as SHOW TABLE_STATISTICS, SHOW INDEX_STATISTICS and SHOW USER_STATISTICS. The first two can interest anyone to periodically check what data [...]

MySQL Slow query log in the table

As of MySQL 5.1 get MySQL slow query log logged in mysql.slow_log table instead of the file as you had in previous versions. We rarely would use this feature as it is incompatible with our slow query analyses patch and tools Fixing this is not trivial while staying 100% compatible to standard format as TIME [...]

Cache Performance Comparison

Jay Pipes continues cache experiements and has compared performance of MySQL Query Cache and File Cache. Jay uses Apache Benchmark to compare full full stack, cached or not which is realistic but could draw missleading picture as contribution of different components may be different depending on your unique applications. For example for application containing a [...]

MySQL Query Cache

MySQL has a great feature called “Query Cache” which is quite helpful for MySQL Performance optimization tasks but there are number of things you need to know. First let me clarify what MySQL Query Cache is – I’ve seen number of people being confused, thinking MySQL Query Cache is the same as Oracle Query Cache [...]