Well, it happened again… Another lengthy EBS outage in the US-East region impacted several sites across the net. While failures like this are rare, they can be quite costly and translate into headaches for the operations team when impact production systems for any length of time. At Percona, we routinely help clients architect and deploy [...]
Visualization tools for pt-query-digest tables
When you process MySQL slow query logs using pt-query-digest you can store samples of each query into query_review table and historical values for review trend analysis into query_review_history table. But it could be difficult to easily browse those tables without a good GUI tool. For the visual browsing of tables created by pt-query-digest you may [...]
MySQL opening .frm even when table is in table definition cache
or… “the case of Stewart recognizing parameters to the read() system call in strace output”. Last week, a colleague asked a question: I have an instance of MySQL with 100 tables and the table_definition_cache set to 1000. My understanding of this is that MySQL won’t revert to opening the FRM files to read the table [...]
Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views
Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]
Innodb undo segment size and transaction isolation
You might know if you have long running transactions you’re risking having a lot of “garbage” accumulated in undo segment size which can cause performance degradation as well as increased disk space usage. Long transactions can also be bad for other reasons such as taking row level locks which will prevent other transactions for execution, [...]
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 [...]
Effect of adaptive_flushing
I recently had the chance to witness the effects of innodb_adaptive_flushing on the performance of InnoDB Plugin 1.0.5 in the wild, which Yasufumi wrote about previously here and here. The server in question was Solaris 10 with 8 disk RAID10 and 2 32GB SSDs used for ZIL and L2ARC, 72G RAM and 40G buffer pool. [...]
Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB
Accidentally me and Baron played with InfoBright (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/09/29/quick-comparison-of-myisam-infobright-and-monetdb/) this week. And following Baron’s example I also run the same load against MonetDB. Reading comments to Baron’s post I tied to load the same data to LucidDB, but I was not successful in this. I tried to analyze a bigger dataset and I took public [...]
Innodb usability and ease of use.
It always surprised me how little Innodb team seems to think about product usability/ease of use, when it comes to settings, performance management etc. I could understand many things 5 years ago, like a lot of information being available only in hard to parse SHOW INNODB STATUS output or even uglier hacks with creating tables [...]
What would make MySQL Multiple Queries Usable ?
MySQL Has API to run Multiple Queries at once. This feature was designed mainly with saving network round trip in mind and got a little traction due to associated security risks and not significant gains in most cases. What would make MySQL Multiple Queries API more usable ?

