Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.30-23.7.4 for MySQL now available
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.30-23.7.4 for MySQL on April 17, 2013. Binaries are available from the downloads area or from our software repositories. New Features: Percona XtraDB Cluster has implemented initial implementation of weighted quorum. Weight for node can be assigned via pc.weight option in the wsrep_provider_options variable. [...]
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 [...]
Investigating MySQL Replication Latency in Percona XtraDB Cluster
I was curious to check how Percona XtraDB Cluster behaves when it comes to MySQL replication latency — or better yet, call it data propagation latency. It was interesting to see whenever I can get stale data reads from other cluster nodes after write performed to some specific node. To test it I wrote quite a [...]
How to debug long-running transactions in MySQL
Among the many things that can cause a “server stall” is a long-running transaction. If a transaction remains open for a very long time without committing, and has modified data, then other transactions could block and fail with a lock wait timeout. The problem is, it can be very difficult to find the offending code [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]
Sharing an auto_increment value across multiple MySQL tables
The title is SEO bait – you can’t do it. We’ve seen a few recurring patterns trying to achieve similar – and I thought I would share with you my favorite two: Option #1: Use a table to insert into, and grab the insert_id:
1 2 3 4 5 | CREATE TABLE option1 (id int not null primary key auto_increment) engine=innodb; # each insert does one operations to get the value: INSERT INTO option1 VALUES (NULL); # $connection->insert_id(); |
Option #2: Use a table with one just row:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | CREATE TABLE option2 (id int not null primary key) engine=innodb; INSERT INTO option2 VALUES (1); # start from 1 # each insert does two operations to get the value: UPDATE option2 SET id=@id:=id+1; SELECT @id; |
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 [...]
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]


mk-query-digest, query comments and the query cache
I very much like the fact that MySQL allows you to embed comments into SQL statements. These comments are extremely convenient, because they are written into MySQL log files as part of the query. This includes the general log, the binary log and the slow query log. Maatkit includes tools which interact with these logs, [...]