This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]
Is Synchronous Replication right for your app?
I talk with lot of people who are really interested in Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and mostly they are interested in PXC as a high-availability solution. But, what they tend not to think too much about is if moving from async to synchronous replication is right for their application or not. Facts about Galera replication [...]
Open Source, the MySQL market (and TokuDB in particular)
I was reviewing the Percona Live sponsors list the other day and pondering the potential success stories associated with this product or that one…. and as I was preparing to put more thought on the topic, a PlanetMySQL post caught my eye. It was penned by Mike Hogan and titled, “Thoughts on Xeround and Free!” [...]
Benchmarking Percona Server TokuDB vs InnoDB
After compiling Percona Server with TokuDB, of course I wanted to compare InnoDB performance vs TokuDB. I have a particular workload I’m interested in testing – it is an insert-intensive workload (which is TokuDB’s strong suit) with some roll-up aggregation, which should produce updates in-place (I will use INSERT .. ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements [...]
Galera Flow Control in Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL
Last week at Percona Live, I delivered a six-hour tutorial about Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL. I actually had more material than I covered (by design), but one thing I regret we didn’t cover was Flow control. So, I thought I’d write a post covering flow control because it is important to understand. What [...]
Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.0.3 for MySQL now available
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.0.3 for MySQL — high-quality components to add enterprise-grade MySQL monitoring and graphing capabilities to your existing in-house, on-premises monitoring solutions. The components are designed to integrate seamlessly with widely deployed solutions such as Nagios and Cacti, and are delivered in the form of [...]
Understanding the maximum number of columns in a MySQL table
This post was initially going to be two sets of polls: “What is the maximum number of columns in MySQL?” and “What is the minimum maximum number of columns in MySQL?”. Before you read on, ponder those questions and come up with your own answers… and see if you’re right or can prove me wrong! [...]
SimCity outages, traffic control and Thread Pool for MySQL
For this post I’m going to shamelessly exploit the litany of technical problems SimCity players encountered earlier this month and a few examples of how Thread Pool for MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL can help to prevent such incidents. Users of SimCity, a city-building and urban planning simulation video game, encountered network outages, issues with [...]
MySQL 5.6.10 Optimizer Limitations: Index Condition Pushdown
While preparing the webinar I will deliver this Friday, I ran into a quite interesting (although not very impacting) optimizer issue: a “SELECT *” taking half the time to execute than the same “SELECT one_indexed_column” query in MySQL 5.6.10. This turned into a really nice exercise for checking the performance and inner workings of one [...]
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 [...]

