Even if you are using a GUI tool to connect to your MySQL servers, one day or another, you will have to deal with the command line. So it is nice to know a few tips that can really make your work easier. Note: The commands below are only available for Unix/Linux. Using pager Most [...]
How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins
February 22, 2012 By 11 Comments
In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]
Statement based replication with Stored Functions, Triggers and Events
December 16, 2011 By 4 Comments
Statement based replication writes the queries that modify data in the Binary Log to replicate them on the slave or to use it as a PITR recovery. Here we will see what is the behavior of the MySQL when it needs to log “not usual” queries like Events, Functions, Stored Procedures, Local Variables, etc. We’ll [...]
The two even more fundamental performance metrics
May 5, 2011 By 6 Comments
In a recent blog post, I wrote about four fundamental metrics for system performance analysis. These are throughput, residence time, “weighted time” (the sum of all residence times in the observation period — the terminology is mine for lack of a better name), and concurrency. I derived all of these metrics from two “even more [...]
The four fundamental performance metrics
April 27, 2011 By 15 Comments
There are many ways to slice and aggregate metrics of activity on a system such as MySQL. In the best case, we want to know everything about the system’s activity: we want to know how many things happened, how big they were, and how long they took. We want to know precisely when they happened. [...]
Should we give a MySQL Query Cache a second chance ?
April 10, 2011 By 64 Comments
Over last few years I’ve been suggesting more people to disable Query Cache than to enable it. It can cause contention problems as well as stalls and due to coarse invalidation is not as efficient as it could be. These are however mostly due to neglect Query Cache received over almost 10 years, with very [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
January 8, 2011 By 4 Comments
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 [...]
How fast is FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK?
April 24, 2010 By 30 Comments
A week or so ago at the MySQL conference, I visited one of the backup vendors in the Expo Hall. I started to chat with them about their MySQL backup product. One of the representatives told me that their backup product uses FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK, which he admitted takes a global lock on [...]
The MySQL optimizer, the OS cache, and sequential versus random I/O
April 28, 2008 By 17 Comments
In my post on estimating query completion time, I wrote about how I measured the performance on a join between a few tables in a typical star schema data warehousing scenario. In short, a query that could take several days to run with one join order takes an hour with another, and the optimizer chose [...]
How to estimate query completion time in MySQL
April 22, 2008 By 16 Comments
Have you ever run a query in MySQL and wondered how long it’ll take to complete? Many people have had this experience. It’s not a big deal until the query has been running for an hour. Or a day and a half. Just when IS that query going to finish, anyway? There are actually a [...]
