May 19, 2013

Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views

Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]

Using Flexviews – part two, change data capture

In my previous post I introduced materialized view concepts. This post begins with an introduction to change data capture technology and describes some of the ways in which it can be leveraged for your benefit. This is followed by a description of FlexCDC, the change data capture tool included with Flexviews. It continues with an [...]

Using Flexviews – part one, introduction to materialized views

If you know me, then you probably have heard of Flexviews. If not, then it might not be familiar to you. I’m giving a talk on it at the MySQL 2011 CE, and I figured I should blog about it before then. For those unfamiliar, Flexviews enables you to create and maintain incrementally refreshable materialized [...]

Video: The InnoDB Storage Engine for MySQL

(This is a cross post from percona.tv – the home of percona material in video form.) Last month I gave a presentation at the PHP UK Conference on the InnoDB storage engine.  I was a last minute speaker, and I want to thank them for the time-slot and their hospitality at short notice.

Webinar: Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup

We’ve had such a large number of signups to our Migrating MyISAM to InnoDB webinar, that we decided to hold one more before the year is out: December, 8th 9AM PST: Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup.

Data mart or data warehouse?

This is part two in my six part series on business intelligence, with a focus on OLAP analysis. Part 1 – Intro to OLAP Identifying the differences between a data warehouse and a data mart. (this post) Introduction to MDX and the kind of SQL which a ROLAP tool must generate to answer those queries. [...]

Intro to OLAP

This is the first of a series of posts about business intelligence tools, particularly OLAP (or online analytical processing) tools using MySQL and other free open source software. OLAP tools are a part of the larger topic of business intelligence, a topic that has not had a lot of coverage on MPB. Because of this, [...]

Goal-Driven Performance Optimization white-paper available

If you were at last month’s MySQL conference, you might have seen a small flyer we were distributing, titled “A brief introduction to Goal-Driven Performance Optimization.” This is a super-compressed technical introduction to one of the methods we use to solve problems as quickly and efficiently as possible. We’ve just posted this on a new [...]

New OLAP Wikistat benchmark: Introduction and call for feedbacks

I’ve seen my posts on Ontime Air traffic and Star Schema Benchmark got a lot of interest (links: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/01/07/star-schema-bechmark-infobright-infinidb-and-luciddb/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/02/analyzing-air-traffic-performance-with-infobright-and-monetdb/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/26/air-traffic-queries-in-luciddb/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/11/02/air-traffic-queries-in-infinidb-early-alpha/ ). However benchmarks by itself did not cover all cases I would want, so I was thinking about better scenario. The biggest problem is to get real big enough dataset, and I thank [...]

Just how useful are binary logs for incremental backups?

We’ve written about replication slaves lagging behind masters before, but one of the other side effects of the binary log being serialized, is that it also limits the effectiveness of using it for incremental backup.  Let me make up some numbers for the purposes of this example: We have 2 Servers in a Master-Slave topology. [...]