As you probably know MySQL Replication (statement based) works by fetching statements from MASTERs binary log and executing them on the SLAVE. Since MySQL 4.0 this process is a bit more involved having events passing via relay logs on the Slave which also means there are two replication threads “IO Thread” and “SQL Thread” used [...]
MySQL Replication vs DRBD Battles
Well these days we see a lot of post for and against (more, more) using of MySQL and DRBD as a high availability practice. I personally think DRBD has its place but there are far more cases when other techniques would work much better for variety of reasons. First let me start with Florian’s comments [...]
MySQL should have dynamic durability settings
If you’re using Innodb tables MySQL has innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit variable which defines how durable your transactions are. If you have high durability requirements you set it to 1 and log records are pushed directly to the disk on transaction commit. If you do not bother loosing come committed transactions you can set it to 0 and [...]
Implementing efficient counters with MySQL
On many web sites you would see a counter how many time given object – blog post, forum thread, image, movie etc was viewed. This is sometimes handy feature but it can be rather expensive from performance point of view. The nasty thing with counters as they are implemented the most trivial way – they [...]
MySQL Master-Master replication manager released
The MySQL Master-Master replication (often in active-passive mode) is popular pattern used by many companies using MySQL for scale out. Most of the companies would have some internal scripts to handle things as automatic fallback and slave cloning but no Open Source solution was made available. Few months ago we were asked to implement such [...]
MySQL MyISAM Active Active Clustering – looking for trouble ?
Reading last few days worth of planet MySQL and commenting on some entries as you can see. The post by Oli catches my attention. There is also PDF with more details available Oli is saying you can use MySQL with Active Active Clustering and MyISAM tables if you follow certain rules like enabling external locking, [...]
Figuring out what limits MySQL Replication
Today I was cloning the master using LVM Snapshot and found it was taking quite a while to catch up, which highlighted replication could be the limiting factor for this system quite soon, so I decided to check what is limiting MySQL Replication speed. My first idea was to check it based on slow query [...]
MySQL Consulting – Being on your own
About half a year have passed since me and Vadim have left MySQL to do MySQL Consulting on our own. Bunch of people have been wondering about our experiences so I thought it would be worth to share it here.
Making MySQL Replication Parallel
Kevin Burton writes about making MySQL Replication Parallel. Many of us have been beaten by the fact MySQL Replication is single threaded so in reality it is only able to use only single CPU and single disk effectively which is getting worse and worse as computers are getting “wider” these days with multi-core CPUs. Kevin [...]
MySQL Server Variables – SQL layer or Storage Engine specific.
MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and [...]

