May 21, 2013

MySQL Backup tools used by Percona Remote DBA for MySQL

As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic [...]

Testing Intel® SSD 910

Intel came on PCI-e SSD market with their Intel SSD 910 card. With a slogan “The ultimate data center SSD” I assume Intel targets rather a server grade hardware, not consumer level. I’ve got one of this card into our lab. I should say it is very price competitive, comparing with other enterprise level PCIe [...]

DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL

Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]

Intel 520 SSD in MySQL sysbench oltp benchmark

In my raw IO benchmark of Intel 520 SSD we saw that the drive does not provide uniform throughput and response time, but it is interesting how does it affect workload if it comes from MySQL. I prepared benchmarks results for Sysbench OLTP workload with MySQL running on Intel 520. You can download it there.

Benchmarking single-row insert performance on Amazon EC2

I have been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and I have some interesting results that I wanted to share. I used a nice and effective tool iiBench which has been developed by Tokutek. Though the “1 billion row insert challenge” for which this tool was originally built is long over, [...]

Testing Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duo

I was lucky enough to get my hands on new Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duo card. So I decided to run the same series of tests I did for other Flash devices. This is ioDrive2 Duo 2.4TB card and it is visible to OS as two devices (1.2TB each), which can be connected together via software RAID. [...]

Testing STEC SSD MACH16 200GB SLC

Following my previous benchmark of Samsung 830, today I want to show results for STEC MACH16 SATA card, 200GB size, this card is based on SLC, and regarding STEC website, it is an enterprise grade storage.

How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins

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 [...]

Looking for RAID Controller without Battery Learning problems ?

A lot have been written about Battery Learning Cycle problems and its impact to MySQL Performance. Here are couple of links (1,2). It is good to see though there are some controllers coming out which solve this problem, namely Adaptec 5Z series controllers (Z stands for Zero Maintenance). This is not quite new technology they [...]

MLC SSD card lifetime and write amplification

As MLC-based SSD cards are raising popularity, there is also a raising concern how long it can survive. As we know, a MLC NAND module can handle 5,000-10,000 erasing cycles, after which it gets unusable. And obviously the SSD card based on MLC NAND has a limited lifetime. There is a lot of misconceptions and [...]