While most of the talk recently has mostly been around the new changes in MySQL 5.6 (and that is understandable), I have had lately some very interesting cases to deal with, with respect to the Metadata Locking related changes that were introduced in MySQL 5.5.3. It appears that the implications of Metadata Locking have not [...]
Filling the tmp partition with persistent connections
The use of tmpfs/ramfs as /tmp partition is a common trick to improve the performance of on-disk temporary tables. Servers usually have less RAM than disk space so those kind of partitions are very limited in size and there are some cases were we can run out of space. Let’s see one example. We’re running [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Failure Scenarios with only 2 nodes
During the design period of a new cluster, it is always advised to have at least 3 nodes (this is the case with PXC but it’s also the same with PRM). But why and what are the risks ? The goal of having more than 2 nodes, in fact an odd number is recommended in [...]
Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9 on August 12, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.58, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all [...]
Percona Server 5.5.14-20.5
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.14-20.5 on August 12, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.14, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.14-20.5 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 4: One thread per connection
This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in core use cases (links: part 1, 2, 3). This post is about the way MySQL handles connections, allocating one thread per connection to the server.
PHP Sessions – Files vs Database Based
One may think changing PHP session handler from file based to database driven is fully transparent. In many cases it is, sometimes however it may cause some unexpected problems as happened to one of our customers. If you use file based sessions PHP will lock session file for whole script execution duration, which means all [...]
MySQL Prepared Statements
If you care about archiving best performance in your application using MySQL you should learn about prepared statements. These do not neccesary provide performance beneft but they may, they also have other benefits. As a quick introduction – before MySQL 4.1 there were only textual statements and textual protocol for data transfer – query was [...]

