I wrote couple of weeks ago on dangers of bad cache design. Today I’ve been troubleshooting the production down case which had fair amount of issues related to how cache was used. The deal was as following. The update to the codebase was performed and it caused performance issues, so it was rolled back but [...]
Why you can’t rely on a replica for disaster recovery
A couple of weeks ago one of my colleagues and I worked on a data corruption case that reminded me that sometimes people make unsafe assumptions without knowing it. This one involved SAN snapshotting that was unsafe. In a nutshell, the client used SAN block-level replication to maintain a standby/failover MySQL system, and there was [...]
How fast is FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK?
A week or so ago at the MySQL conference, I visited one of the backup vendors in the Expo Hall. I started to chat with them about their MySQL backup product. One of the representatives told me that their backup product uses FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK, which he admitted takes a global lock on [...]
When the subselect runs faster
A few weeks ago, we had a query optimization request from one of our customer. The query was very simple like:
1 | SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE (col1='A'||col1='B') ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 20 OFFSET 0 |
This column in the table is looks like this:
1 | `col1` enum('A','B','C','CD','DE','F','G','HI') default NULL |
The table have 549252 rows and of course, there is an index on the col1. MySQL estimated the cardinality of that index as [...]
A few administrative updates
I wanted to write a few administrative updates in one so I didn’t spam everyone’s feed readers too much. Here we go: We’ve had reports of some lost comments. Â We reported this via Twitter a while ago, but thought it was fixed. Â We’ll try and pay more attention to spam filtering, but we wanted to [...]
Sphinx Technologies launches Sphinx Support
A couple of weeks ago Sphinx Technologies, a company behind Sphinx Full Text Search Engine launched Sphinx Support Packages which I think is a great value for everyone using Sphinx in Production. This is also a great way to support the project and get something in return – even if you’re not actively using support [...]
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 [...]
MySQL extensions for hosting
A few weeks ago I was asked to isolate some functionalities from Mark Callaghan’s MySQL patch bundle. They were extensions adding per-user and per-table accounting to the database, accessible with a new set of commands such as SHOW TABLE_STATISTICS, SHOW INDEX_STATISTICS and SHOW USER_STATISTICS. The first two can interest anyone to periodically check what data [...]
Kickfire Kickfire Kickfire
So it looks like these days Kickfire welcomed everyone to tell they’ve been working with Kickfire – Baron Keith Frank is writing about KickFire. Good Job Kickfire PR team you really energized community. We also were working with Kickfire for quite a while and are also very excited to give it a try.
MySQL and Sun – Oportunity for smaller companies ?
Reading Martens interview we see the quite: “As soon as the deal closed we immediately secured a big deal with a major European national police agency,” said Mickos, now SVP database products at Sun. “Key to them choosing MySQL was that we are now part of a much larger public corporation. The deal wouldn’t have [...]

