Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these [...]
MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark
So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload. I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins. I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table. The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]
The Optimization That (Often) Isn’t: Index Merge Intersection
Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]
SQL Injection Questions Followup
I presented a webinar today about SQL Injection, to try to clear up some of the misconceptions that many other blogs and articles have about this security risk. You can register for the webinar even now that I’ve presented it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording, which will be available soon. During [...]
Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.0.0 GA
I’m really excited to today announce the first GA (Generally Available; i.e. stable) release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0. We have worked hard since our last major release on improving the reliability and user experience of Percona XtraBackup as well as adding features to make it better suited to more environments. The 2.0.0 release contains no [...]
Is your MySQL Application having Busy IO by Oracle Measures ?
Preparing Choosing Storage Systems for MySQL talk for Percona Live in Washington,DC I ran into great paper called Sane SAN 2010 by James Morle from Scale Abilities – and Oracle consulting company. It is worth to read for variety of reason yet for this post I wanted to mention what James calls “Busy” Oracle database [...]
Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance
When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]
Multiple MySQL instances on Fusion-io ioDrive
It is known that MySQL due internal limitations is not able to utilize all CPU and IO resources available on modern hardware. Idea is to run multiple instances of MySQL to gain better performance on Fusion-io ioDrive card. Full report is available in PDF
How Innodb Contention may manifest itself
Even though multiple fixes have been implemented in Percona Server and MySQL 5.5, there are still workloads in which case mutex (or rw-lock) contention is a performance limiting factor, helped by ever growing number of cores available in the systems. It is interesting though the contention may manifest itself in the different form from the [...]
Finding an optimal balance of I/O, CPU, and RAM for MySQL
For a long time I’ve wanted to know how MySQL scales as you add more memory to the server. Vadim recently benchmarked the effects of increasing memory and CPU core count. He looked for a balance between utilizing the hardware as much as possible, limiting the system complexity, and lowering the price-to-performance ratio. The outcome [...]

