May 24, 2013

Percona turns 5 years old

It’s August 1st, 2011, and five years ago on or about this date (who can remember clearly?) Peter Zaitsev and Vadim Tkachenko founded Percona. What’s happened in the last five years?

Is VoltDB really as scalable as they claim?

Before I begin, a disclaimer. VoltDB is not a customer, and did not pay Percona or me to investigate VoltDB’s scalability or publish this blog post. More disclaimers at the end. Short version: VoltDB is very scalable; it should scale to 120 partitions, 39 servers, and 1.6 million complex transactions per second at over 300 [...]

Percona Live is on Wednesday – thank you to all our sponsors

Percona Live is in only two days away – and we’ve managed to completely sell out (something I predicted earlier).  Before I go into details, I want to thank three sponsors who have been absolutely awesome: Clustrix is providing an open bar all evening, New Relic is providing all attendees with lunch and Fusion-io is [...]

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 [...]

Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list

I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]

The perils of uniform hardware and RAID auto-learn cycles

Last night a customer had an emergency in selected machines on a large cluster of quite uniform database servers. Some of the servers were slowing down in a very puzzling way over a short time span (a couple of hours). Queries were taking multiple seconds to execute instead of being practically instantaneous. But nothing seemed [...]

Percona’s Commitments to MySQL Users

You probably saw the Twitter storm over Oracle’s pricing changes and InnoDB in the last few days. The fear about Oracle removing InnoDB from the free version of MySQL was baseless — it was just a misunderstanding. Still, in the years since MySQL has been acquired by Sun, and then by Oracle, many MySQL users [...]

MySQL Limitations Part 4: One thread per connection

This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in core use cases (links: part 1, 2, 3). This post is about the way MySQL handles connections, allocating one thread per connection to the server.

Percona Launches New Support Option for MySQL

We’ve just announced a new support offering for MySQL. There’s a press release here, and product information page here. But what does this new service really mean for you, in practical terms? This is actually important — it will open up a range of new choices for you. I’ll explain two major points that matter [...]

First Sphinx Conference is Announced

The First ever Sphinx Users Conference is announced to take place in Moscow, Russia on October 24th, which is the Sunday before Highload.ru conference, so if you’re attending that you may just drop by to this event too. this is going to be free technically focused event, close in spirit to Percona Performance Conference, we [...]