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 [...]
Is Synchronous Replication right for your app?
I talk with lot of people who are really interested in Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and mostly they are interested in PXC as a high-availability solution. But, what they tend not to think too much about is if moving from async to synchronous replication is right for their application or not. Facts about Galera replication [...]
Webinar: MySQL 5.6 Performance Schema
This Wednesday, May 15 at 10 a.m. Pacific, I’ll be leading a Webinar titled, “Using MySQL 5.6 Performance Schema to Troubleshoot Typical Workload Bottlenecks.” In this Webinar I will offer an overview of Performance Schema, focusing on new features that have been added in MySQL 5.6, go over the configuration and spend most time showing [...]
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) [...]
Follow these basics when migrating to Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL
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 [...]
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 [...]
Memory allocators: MySQL performance improvements in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2
In addition to the problem with trx_list scan we discussed in Friday’s post, there is another issue in InnoDB transaction processing that notably affects MySQL performance – for every transaction InnoDB creates a read view and allocates memory for this structure from heap. The problem is that the heap for that allocation is destroyed on [...]

