I wrote about Galera about 1.5 years ago: State of the art: Galera – synchronous replication for InnoDB. It was about the 0.7 release, which was more like a proof-of-concept release (though Galera’s developers may not agree with that ) with some serious limitations (like using mysqldump for node propagation). The Galera team heard my [...]
Battery Learning still problem many years after
The performance problems caused by battery auto learning go many years back. We wrote about it, other people from MySQL Community too. The situation did not get better, at least not with Dell RAID controllers, H700 and H800 have the same problem too. At the same time situation got worse as a lot more people [...]
Estimating Replication Capacity
It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to optimize your system when your replication runs [...]
Introducing percona-patches for 5.1
Our patches for 5.0 have attracted significant interest. You can read about SecondLife’s experience here, as well as what Flickr had to say on their blog. The main improvements come in both performance gains and improvements to diagnostics (such as the improvements to the slow log output, and INDEX_STATISTICS). Despite having many requests to port [...]
Statistics of InnoDB tables and indexes available in xtrabackup
If you ever wondered how big is that or another index in InnoDB … you had to calculate it yourself by multiplying size of row (which I should add is harder in the case of a VARCHAR – since you need to estimate average length) on count of records. And it still would be quite [...]
xtrabackup-0.6
We announce next beta version of our xtrabackup tool. Changelist includes: – set innodb_fast_shutdown=1 on xtrabackup shutdown – set innodb_write_io_threads=10 by default for fast buffer_pool flushing during recovery – build xtrabackup with –with-extra-charsets=complex Bug #357653: innobackupex-1.5.1 –copy-back fails Bug #358194: 2nd-phase is very slow Bug #358266: xtrabackup-0.5 dies with SEGV on bad command line arguments [...]
My “hot” list for next InnoDB features
Many InnoDB scalability problems seem fixed in InnoDB-plugin-1.0.3 and I expect InnoDB-plugin will run fine on 16-24 cores boxes for many workloads. And now it is time to look on systems with 32GB+ of RAM which are not rare nowadays. Working with real customer systems I have wish-list of features I would like to see [...]
Disaster: LVM Performance in Snapshot Mode
In many cases I speculate how things should work based on what they do and in number of cases this lead me forming too good impression about technology and when running in completely unanticipated bug or performance bottleneck. This is exactly the case with LVM Number of customers have reported the LVM gives very high [...]
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 [...]
Living with backups
Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]

