As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic [...]
MySQL 5.6.7-RC in tpcc-mysql benchmark
MySQL 5.6.7 RC is there, so I decided to test how it performs in tpcc-mysql workload from both performance and stability standpoints. I can’t say that my experience was totally flawless, I bumped into two bugs: MySQL 5.6.7 locks itself on CREATE INDEX MySQL 5.6.7-rc crashed under tpcc-mysql workload But at the end, is not [...]
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 Server 5.5.17-22.1 released
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.17-22.1 on November 19th, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.17, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.17-22.1 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona ‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]
Performance problem with Innodb and DROP TABLE
I’ve been working with an application which does a lot of CREATE and DROP table for Innodb tables and we’ve discovered DROP TABLE can take a lot of time and when it happens a lot of other threads stall in “Opening Tables” State. Also contrary to my initial suspect benchmarking create/drop table was CPU bound [...]
Two Types of MySQL Users
In comments to my previous post I got number number of comments saying if MySQL would not have multiple storage engine interface it would not allow people to do various very cool stuff. And I agree with this. The question is how cool you want your database operation to be ? Visiting customers I see [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
How innodb_open_files affects performance
Recently I looked at table_cache sizing which showed larger table cache does not always provides the best performance. So I decided to look at yet another similar variable – innodb_open_files which defines how many files Innodb will keep open while working in innodb_file_per_table mode. Unlike MyISAM Innodb does not have to keep open file descriptor [...]
Crashes while using MyISAM with multiple key caches
Over last couple of years I have ran into random MySQL crashes in production when multiple key caches were used. Unfortunately this never was frequent or critical enough issue so I could spend time creating repeatable test case and search of the bug in the MySQL database did not find anything. Recently we had this [...]
Should you move from MyISAM to Innodb ?
There is significant portion of customers which are still using MyISAM when they come to us, so one of the big questions is when it is feasible to move to Innodb and when staying on MyISAM is preferred ? I generally prefer to see Innodb as the main storage engine because it makes life much [...]

