May 19, 2013

Fast storage: 8 SSD Intel X-25M 80GB benchmarks

I appreciate opportunity Jos van Dongen from Tholis Consulting gave me. He granted me access to servers with 8 attached Intel X-25M 80GB MLC cards. The cards attached to 2 Adaptec 5805 raid controllers, with 4 cards per controller. The cost of setup is 8 x 260$ (X-25M) + 2×500$ (Adaptec 5805) = ~3000$. Available [...]

FusionIO – time for benchmarks

I posted about FusionIO couple times RAID vs SSD vs FusionIO and Testing FusionIO: strict_sync is too strict…. The problem was that FusionIO did not provide durability or results were too bad in strict mode, so I lost interest FusionIO for couple month. But I should express respect to FusionIO team, they did not ignore [...]

Quick comparison of MyISAM, Infobright, and MonetDB

Recently I was doing a little work for a client who has MyISAM tables with many columns (the same one Peter wrote about recently). The client’s performance is suffering in part because of the number of columns, which is over 200. The queries are generally pretty simple (sums of columns), but they’re ad-hoc (can access [...]

Friday challenge: ibd recovery

I want to make this Friday a bit more interesting – how do you feel to train a bit in InnoDB data recovery techniques. I have .ibd datafile which was created by query CREATE TABLE `tryme` ( `email` mediumblob, `content` mediumblob ) ENGINE=InnoDB … (SOME PARAMETERS SKIPPED) …; and I inserted one record into this [...]

Using INFORMATION_SCHEMA instead of shell scripting

INFORMATION_SCHEMA, in particular by favorite TABLES table is not only helpful to understand tables you have on the system, but I have also found it to be very helpful as a scripting language for variety of database administration tasks. It can be more straightforward compared to using shell or Perl when the operation is database [...]

New SpecJAppServer results at MySQL and Sun.

As you likely have seen Sun has posted the new SpecJAppServer Results More information from Tom Daly can be found here These results are quite interesting for me as I worked on some of the previous SpecJAppServer Benchmarks several years ago while being employed by MySQL. These are great results, plus they can be relevant [...]

Poor man’s query logging

Occasionally there is a need to see what queries reach MySQL. The database provides several ways to share that information with you. One is called general log activated with

(or

in MySQL 5.1+) start-up parameter. The log writes any query being executed by MySQL to a file with limited amount of additional information. [...]

Living with backups

Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]

A quest for the full InnoDB status

When running InnoDB you are able to dig into the engine internals, look at various gauges and counters, see past deadlocks and the list of all open transactions. This is in your reach with one simple command —

. On most occasions it works beautifully. The problems appear when you have a large spike in [...]

Rendundant Array of Inexpensive Servers

So you need to design highly available MySQL powered system… how do you approach that ? Too often I see the question is approached by focusing on expensive hardware which in theory should be reliable. And this really can work quite well for small systems. It is my experience – with quality commodity hardware (Dell,HP,IBM [...]