May 22, 2013

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 [...]

Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 released today with beta support for MySQL 5.6

Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 was released today and the new version comes with some pretty cool news: Beta support for MySQL 5.6 (which as you might know is also in beta). In addition to various bug fixes, Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 also offers beta support for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC). Version 2.1.8 continues the trend of solid [...]

Percona Toolkit by example – pt-stalk

pt-stalk recipes: Gather forensic data about MySQL when a server problem occurs It happens to us all from time to time: a server issue arises that leaves you scratching your head. That’s when Percona Toolkit’s pt-stalk comes into play, helping you diagnose the problem by capturing diagnostic data that helps you pinpoint what’s causing the [...]

MySQL Wish for 2013 – Better Memory Accounting

With Performance Schema improvements in MySQL 5.6 I think we’re in the good shape with insight on what is causing performance bottlenecks as well as where CPU resources are spent. (Performance Schema does not accounts CPU usage directly but it is something which can be relatively easily derived from wait and stage information). Where we’re [...]

How to STOP SLAVE on Amazon RDS read replica

We are doing a migration from Amazon RDS to EC2 with a customer. This, unfortunately, involves some downtime – if you are an RDS user, you probably know you can’t replicate an RDS instance to an external server (or even EC2). While it is annoying, this post isn’t going to be a rant on how [...]

Get Me Some Query Logs!

One of my favorite tools in the Percona Toolkit is pt-query-digest.  This tool is indispensable for identifying your top SQL queries, and analyzing which queries are accounting for your database load. But the report you get from pt-query-digest is only as good as the log of queries you give it as input.  You need a large [...]

Announcing Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.28-23.7

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster on November 15th, 2012. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories. Features: Percona XtraDB Cluster has ported Twitter’s MySQL NUMA patch. This patch implements improved NUMA support as it prevents imbalanced memory allocation across NUMA nodes. Number of binlog files [...]

Debugging MySQL SSL problems

This is not necessarily going to be a comprehensive post, but I learned somethings about MySQL SSL today that I thought would be worth sharing. I was setting up a PRM install for a customer and one of the requirements was SSL replication.  In this particular case, I had setup PRM first, and then was [...]

Edge-case behavior of INSERT…ODKU

A few weeks back, I was working on a customer issue wherein they were observing database performance that dropped through the floor (to the point of an outage) roughly every 4 weeks or so. Nothing special about the environment, the hardware, or the queries; really, the majority of the database was a single table with [...]