May 25, 2013

Is VoltDB really as scalable as they claim?

Before I begin, a disclaimer. VoltDB is not a customer, and did not pay Percona or me to investigate VoltDB’s scalability or publish this blog post. More disclaimers at the end. Short version: VoltDB is very scalable; it should scale to 120 partitions, 39 servers, and 1.6 million complex transactions per second at over 300 [...]

Shard-Query adds parallelism to queries

Preamble: On performance, workload and scalability: MySQL has always been focused on OLTP workloads. In fact, both Percona Server and MySQL 5.5.7rc have numerous performance improvements which benefit workloads that have high concurrency. Typical OLTP workloads feature numerous clients (perhaps hundreds or thousands) each reading and writing small chunks of data. The recent improvements to [...]

Community Events February-March

February and March as busy months for Community events.  There’s MySQL University, Fosdem, the Seattle MySQL Meetup & Confoo.ca.

2010 Percona Training Schedule

After a nice long vacation, it’s time to unveil our destinations for public classes in 2010.  We are now offering a course for Developers as well as DBAs.  The dates are: Seattle 16 February San Francisco 18-19 February Boston 22-23 February New York City 25-26 February Montréal 8-9 March Denver 15-16 March Chicago 18-19 March [...]

table_cache negative scalability

Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]

Finding your MySQL High-Availability solution – Replication

In the last 2 blog posts about High Availability for MySQL we have introduced definitions and provided a list of ( questions that you need to ask yourself before choosing a HA solution. In this new post, we will cover what is the most popular HA solution for MySQL, replication.

State of the art: Galera – synchronous replication for InnoDB

First time I heard about Galera on Percona Performance Conference 2009, Seppo Jaakola was presenting “Galera: Multi-Master Synchronous MySQL Replication Clusters”. It was impressed as I personally always wanted it for InnoDB, but we had it in plans at the bottom of the list, as this is very hard to implement properly. The idea by [...]

Why you don’t want to shard.

Note: This blog post is part 1 of 4 on building our training workshop.

The Percona training workshop will not cover sharding. If you follow our blog, you’ll notice we don’t talk much about the subject; in some cases it makes sense, but in many we’ve seen that it causes architectures to be prematurely complicated.

So let me state it: You don’t want to shard.

Optimize everything else first, and then if performance still isn’t good enough, it’s time to take a very bitter medicine. The reason you need to shard basically comes down to one of these two reasons

Another ingenious piece of Sun Marketing

So a while ago I wrote about fun post about MySQL Scalability to 256 way…. Besides discussion on the thread itself I had a lot of private comments in my mail from Sun/MySQL employees which tended to agree with me on this being the a large stretch.

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]