I recently had to do some customer work involving the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin and would like to share my experience in this post. Auditing user activity in MySQL has traditionally been challenging. Most data can be obtained from the slow or general log, but this involves a lot of data you don’t need too, and [...]
MySQL and the SSB – Part 2 – MyISAM vs InnoDB low concurrency
This blog post is part two in what is now a continuing series on the Star Schema Benchmark. In my previous blog post I compared MySQL 5.5.30 to MySQL 5.6.10, both with default settings using only the InnoDB storage engine. In my testing I discovered that innodb_old_blocks_time had an effect on performance of the benchmark. There was [...]
Percona XtraBackup 2.1.0 ‘release candidate’ for MySQL available for download
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.0-rc1 on May 7, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here. For this RC release, we will not be making APT and YUM repositories available, just base deb and RPM packages This is an Release Candidate quality release and is not intended for [...]
Percona XtraBackup 2.0.7 for MySQL available for download
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0.7 for MySQL on May 6, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories. Percona XtraBackup is the world’s only open-source, free MySQL hot backup software that performs non-blocking backups for InnoDB and XtraDB databases. This release is the current GA (Generally Available) [...]
Rotating MySQL slow logs safely
This blog post is part two of two. Like part one, published Wednesday, this is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog. Thanks again to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon. And one more reminder that I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo next week in Santa Clara, California so look for me there. You [...]
MySQL 5.6 – InnoDB Memcached Plugin as a caching layer
A common practice to offload traffic from MySQL 5.6 is to use a caching layer to store expensive result sets or objects. Some typical use cases include: Complicated query result set (search results, recent users, recent posts, etc) Full page output (relatively static pages) Full objects (user or cart object built from several queries) Infrequently [...]
Why MySQL Performance at Low Concurrency is Important
A few weeks ago I wrote about “MySQL Performance at High Concurrency” and why it is important, which was followed up by Vadim’s post on ThreadPool in Percona Server providing some great illustration on the topic. This time I want to target an opposite question: why MySQL performance at low concurrency is important for you. [...]
MySQL 5.6 Compatible Percona Toolkit 2.2 Released
A new Percona Toolkit series has been released: Percona Toolkit 2.2 for MySQL 5.6. Several months in the making and many new features, changes, and improvements make this a great new series. It replaces the 2.1 series for which we plan to do only one more bug fix release (as 2.1.10) then retire. 2.2 is [...]
Analyzing Slow Query Table in MySQL 5.6
Next week I’m teaching an online Percona Training class, called Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit. This is a guided tour of best practices for pt-query-digest, the best tool for evaluating where your database response time is being spent. This month we saw the GA release of MySQL 5.6, and I wanted to check if any [...]

