With Percona Live NYC right around the corner I decide some of attendees what did they like on the last year event and what they are looking forward to in 2012. Here are some responses I got. If you’ve attended in 2011 or planning to join us in 2012 please feel free to comment with [...]
Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO
Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]
Why ALTER TABLE shows as two transactions in SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS
When executing an ALTER TABLE, InnoDB (and XtraDB) will create two InnoDB transactions: One transaction is created when the table being ALTERed is locked by the server. This will show up as something like “TABLE LOCK table `schema`.`table_name` trx id XXXX lock mode S” in SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS. Another is created when adding or [...]
Find and remove duplicate indexes
Having duplicate keys in our schemas can hurt the performance of our database: They make the optimizer phase slower because MySQL needs to examine more query plans. The storage engine needs to maintain, calculate and update more index statistics DML and even read queries can be slower because MySQL needs update fetch more data to [...]
Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields
Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]
Benchmarking single-row insert performance on Amazon EC2
I have been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and I have some interesting results that I wanted to share. I used a nice and effective tool iiBench which has been developed by Tokutek. Though the “1 billion row insert challenge” for which this tool was originally built is long over, [...]
Join Optimizations in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the third blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is targeted at the join related optimizations introduced in the optimizer. These optimizations are available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5, and MariaDB 5.5 [...]
Multi Range Read (MRR) in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the second blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is aimed at the optimizer enhancement Multi Range Read (MRR). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 Now let’s take a look at [...]
Index Condition Pushdown in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 and its performance impact
I have been working with Peter in preparation for the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. We are taking a look at and benchmarking optimizer enhancements one by one. So in the same way this blog post is aimed at a new optimizer enhancement Index Condition Pushdown (ICP). Its available [...]
How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins
In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]

