Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these [...]
Percona Live MySQL Conference 2013 wrap-up
The Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 was April 22-25 in Santa Clara, California. This was Percona’s second year organizing the conference and we were very pleased with the event and the feedback (check the #perconalive hashtag for a sampling of the great comments such as this from Tom Krouper or this from John [...]
More on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization
Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]
Percona Server 5.5.30 with TokuDB for MySQL
I was excited to see that TokuDB for MySQL from Tokutek is now open source. I believe this is a great technology and it was a significant restriction on the adoption when it was distributed only in a binary format with a proprietary license. So I went and built Percona Server 5.5.30 with TokuDB’s storage [...]
Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 rerelease fixes non-restart issue
In our last 5.5 series release of Percona Server, we included a regression in the RPM packaging that prevented the server from restarting following an upgrade — instead, the server would remain stopped after the upgrade was completed regardless of its state before updating. This caused some problems for some users, especially if automatic upgrading was configured [...]
High-load problems? Investigate them with ‘pt-query-digest’
I had the chance to work on an interesting case last week, and I thought I’d share what I think is a little known goodie from Percona Toolkit for MySQL called pt-query-digest. One customer was suffering from periods of high load on their database server, leading to degraded application performance, and sometimes even short moments [...]
Percona XtraBackup 2.1.0 for MySQL beta now available
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.0 for MySQL beta on April 22, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here. For this BETA release, we will not be making APT and YUM repositories available, just base deb and RPM packages This is an BETA quality release and is not [...]
How to recover table structure from InnoDB dictionary
To recover a dropped or corrupt table with Percona Data Recovery Tool for InnoDB you need two things: media with records(ibdata1, *.ibd, disk image, etc.) and a table structure. Indeed, there is no information about the table structure in an InnoDB page. Normally we either recover the structure from .frm files or take it from [...]
MySQL alternative Percona Server 5.1.68 -14.6 now available
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.68 -14.6 on April 19, 2013 (downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.68, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.68-14.6, a MySQL alternative, is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona‘s software is open source and free, all the [...]
The write cache: Swap insanity tome III
Swapping has always been something bad for MySQL performance but it is even more important for HA systems. It is so important to avoid swapping with HA that NDB cluster basically forbids calling malloc after the startup phase and hence its rather complex configuration. Probably most readers of this blog know (or should know) about [...]

