May 22, 2013

Testing MySQL column stores

Recently I had the opportunity to do some testing on a large data set against two MySQL column-store storage engines. I’d like to note that this effort was sponsored by Infobright, but this analysis reflects my independent testing from an objective viewpoint. I performed two different types of testing. The first focused on core functionality [...]

Is your server’s performance about to degrade?

I’ve been talking and writing a bit lately about the scaling problems I’m seeing on fast servers running lots of queries. As a rough guide, I’m seeing this in servers running 20k queries per second and higher, lots of memory, lots of CPU cores, and most queries are running faster than one millisecond; some in [...]

Upgrading MySQL

Upgrading MySQL Server is a very interesting task as you can approach it with so much different “depth”. For some this is 15 minutes job for others it is many month projects. Why is that ? Performing MySQL upgrade two things should normally worry you. It is Regressions – functionality regressions when what you’ve been [...]

table_cache negative scalability

Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]

Just do the math!

One of the most typical reasons for performance and scalability problems I encounter is simply failing to do the math. And these are typically bad one because it often leads to implementing architectures which are not up for job they are intended to solve. Let me start with example to make it clear. Lets say [...]

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 [...]

Will Percona Support Drizzle ?

People are asking me if Percona will support Drizzle and what is in general our position regarding this project. First about Support. We surely will support the customers if they select to run the Drizzle instead of MySQL Server. For us it is same as supporting MySQL Server with custom patches, which we do. In [...]

How to load large files safely into InnoDB with LOAD DATA INFILE

Recently I had a customer ask me about loading two huge files into InnoDB with LOAD DATA INFILE. The goal was to load this data on many servers without putting it into the binary log. While this is generally a fast way to load data (especially if you disable unique key checks and foreign key [...]

Web Site Optimization: FrontEnd and BackEnd

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week on Velocity Conference It was quite interesting event worth attending and it was very good to see the problems in this are going beyond Apache, PHP, Memcache and MySQL. A lot of talks on this conference was focusing on what is called “FrontEnd”. The meaning of Frontend is [...]

Is disk Everything for MySQL Performance ?

I read very nice post by Matt today and it has many good insights though I can’t say I agree on all points. First there is a lot of people out where which put it as disk is everything. Remember Paul Tuckfield saying “You should ask how many disks they have instead of how many [...]