After compiling Percona Server with TokuDB, of course I wanted to compare InnoDB performance vs TokuDB. I have a particular workload I’m interested in testing – it is an insert-intensive workload (which is TokuDB’s strong suit) with some roll-up aggregation, which should produce updates in-place (I will use INSERT .. ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements [...]
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 XtraDB Cluster 5.5.30-23.7.4 for MySQL now available
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.30-23.7.4 for MySQL on April 17, 2013. Binaries are available from the downloads area or from our software repositories. New Features: Percona XtraDB Cluster has implemented initial implementation of weighted quorum. Weight for node can be assigned via pc.weight option in the wsrep_provider_options variable. [...]
MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark
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. [...]
Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance
MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
Introducing percona-patches for 5.1
Our patches for 5.0 have attracted significant interest. You can read about SecondLife’s experience here, as well as what Flickr had to say on their blog. The main improvements come in both performance gains and improvements to diagnostics (such as the improvements to the slow log output, and INDEX_STATISTICS). Despite having many requests to port [...]
MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 1
All to often people force themselves into using a database like MySQL with no thought into whether if its the best solution to there problem. Why? Because their other applications use it, so why not the new application? Over the past couple of months I have been doing a ton of work for clients who [...]
Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge
The mistake I commonly see among MySQL users is how indexes are created. Quite commonly people just index individual columns as they are referenced in where clause thinking this is the optimal indexing strategy. For example if I would have something like AGE=18 AND STATE=’CA’ they would create 2 separate indexes on AGE and STATE [...]
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]
Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I
Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]

