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 [...]
How fast is FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK?
April 24, 2010 By 30 Comments
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 [...]
Percona sessions at the MySQL conference
March 15, 2010 By 6 Comments
Many Percona employees will be at the 2010 MySQL conference. We’ll be giving a lot of informative technical talks on various topics. Here’s a list: Morgan Tocker, Baron Schwartz: Diagnosing and Fixing MySQL Performance Problems Peter Zaitsev: Scaling Applications with Caching, Sharding and Replication Baron Schwartz: EXPLAIN Demystified Vadim Tkachenko: An Overview of Flash Storage [...]
Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio
February 28, 2010 By 28 Comments
I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]
Percona is hiring a consultant
December 16, 2009 By 7 Comments
We’re hiring. We are looking for the following qualifications: Expert knowledge of MySQL. Not just “certified” — years of production experience with it. You need to know server internals, for example. You need to be able to do anything from optimizing difficult queries to moving high-volume services between data centers without interruption. Expert knowledge of [...]
Why delayed flushing can result in less work
December 9, 2009 By 5 Comments
I can think of at least two major reasons why systems delay flushing changes to durable storage: 1. So they can do the work when it’s more convenient. 2. So they can do less work in total. Let’s look at how the second property can be true.
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments
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, AIX5L and malloc()
November 3, 2008 By 11 Comments
Some time ago I get brand new IBM POWER6 server as the replacement for “old” P5 used to host Oracle database. Because we planed to use advanced virtualization with VIOS + LPAR/DLPAR I conceived the idea to use one spare partition for MySQL tests. Because I had no past experience with it and there is [...]
Recovery beyond data restore
August 2, 2008 By 11 Comments
Quite frequently I see customers looking at recovery as on ability to restore data from backup which can be far from being enough to restore the whole system to operating state, especially for complex systems. Instead of looking just at data restore process you better look at the whole process which is required to bring [...]
The #1 mistake hosting providers make for MySQL servers
July 25, 2008 By 30 Comments
This article is not meant to malign hosting providers, but I want to point out something you should be aware of if you’re getting someone else to build and host your servers for you. Most hosting providers — even the big names — continue to install 32-bit GNU/Linux operating systems on 64-bit hardware. This is [...]
