May 25, 2013

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

March 11, 2013 By 7 Comments

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

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InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

February 26, 2013 By 1 Comment

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

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How to find MySQL queries worth optimizing ?

September 11, 2012 By 6 Comments

One question I often get is how one can find out queries which should be optimized. By looking at pt-query-digest report it is easy to find slow queries or queries which cause the large portion of the load on the system but how do we know whenever there is any possibility to make this query [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

Write contentions on the query cache

September 5, 2012 By 5 Comments

While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO

August 28, 2012 By 3 Comments

Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]

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How to Identify Bad Queries in MySQL

January 10, 2011 By 16 Comments

Finding bad queries is a big part of optimization. A scientific optimization process can be simplified to “can anything be improved for less than it costs not to improve it? – if not, we’re done.” In databases, we care most about the work the database is doing. That is, queries. There are other things we [...]

Filed Under: Insight for Developers, MySQL

Caching could be the last thing you want to do

July 24, 2010 By 14 Comments

I recently had a run-in with a very popular PHP ecommerce package which makes me want to voice a recurring mistake I see in how many web applications are architected. What is that mistake? The ecommerce package I was working with depended on caching.  Out of the box it couldn’t serve 10 pages/second unless I [...]

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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 [...]

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Community Events February-March

January 22, 2010 By 4 Comments

February and March as busy months for Community events.  There’s MySQL University, Fosdem, the Seattle MySQL Meetup & Confoo.ca.

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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 [...]

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