I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]
Is MySQL 5.6 slower than MySQL 5.5?
There have been a number reports/benchmarks showing MySQL 5.6 to be slower than MySQL 5.5 on variety of workloads. There are many possible reasons and I believe we will learn about many of them in the next few weeks and months as MySQL 5.6 is starting to get production battle-tested and there is inflow of [...]
Announcing Percona Server 5.1.66-14.2
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.66-14.2 on January 15th, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.66, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.66-14.2 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]
Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters
One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]
CVE-2012-4414 strikes back in MySQL 5.5.29 (and what we’re doing in Percona Server 5.5.29)
In preparing Percona Server 5.5.29 (not yet released, but soon), I filed MySQL bug 68045 (is marked private as it’s a security bug). This bug is in relation to the Oracle fix for CVE-2012-4414 and a problem I found with it. The MariaDB fix (which we incorporated into Percona Server 5.5.28-29.3) is not affected. When the [...]
Percona Toolkit Webinar followup Q&A
First, a thank you to everyone who attended the webinar Today, I appreciate your time and nice comments. As promised, here are answers to questions that couldn’t be answered during the talk: Q: How do you install the tools? The manual has full details, but it’s important to know that the latest release for [...]
Using pt-table-checksum with Percona XtraDB Cluster
As of Percona Toolkit v2.1.5, pt-table-checksum works correctly with Percona XtraDB Cluster, but it doesn’t work quite like a traditional replication setup because cluster nodes are not like traditional replicas. In this post I demonstrate how to use pt-table-checksum with Percona XtraDB Cluster. First, you’ll need Percona Toolkit v2.1.5 or newer and Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.27-23.6 [...]
Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup
I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance. Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions. Here are their questions and my [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Multi-node writing and Unexpected deadlocks
Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and the technology it uses (Galera) is an exciting alternative to traditional MySQL replication. For those who don’t know, it gives you: Fully Synchronous replication with a write latency increase equivalent to a ping RTT to the furthest node Automatic cluster synchronization, both incremental and full restores The ability to read [...]
On Character Sets and Disappearing Tables
The MySQL manual tells us that regardless of whether or not we use “SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0″ before making schema changes, InnoDB will not allow a column referenced by a foreign key constraint to be modified in such a way that the foreign key will reference a column with a mismatched data type. For instance, if we [...]

