I am currently working with a large customer and I am involved with servers located in two data centers, one with Solaris servers and the other one with Linux servers. The Solaris side is cleverly setup using zones and ZFS and this provides a very low virtualization overhead. I learned quite a lot about these [...]
Experiences with the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin
May 23, 2013 By 2 Comments
I recently had to do some customer work involving the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin and would like to share my experience in this post. Auditing user activity in MySQL has traditionally been challenging. Most data can be obtained from the slow or general log, but this involves a lot of data you don’t need too, and [...]
Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 2
May 17, 2013 By 3 Comments
This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]
Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 1
May 16, 2013 By 3 Comments
(This is part one of a two part series) Over the past few weeks I have been looking at a preview release of Virident’s vCache software, which is a kernel module and set of utilities designed to provide functionality similar to that of FlashCache. In particular, Virident engaged Percona to do a usability and feature-set [...]
Benchmarking Percona Server TokuDB vs InnoDB
May 7, 2013 By 32 Comments
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 [...]
Galera Flow Control in Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL
May 2, 2013 By 5 Comments
Last week at Percona Live, I delivered a six-hour tutorial about Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL. I actually had more material than I covered (by design), but one thing I regret we didn’t cover was Flow control. So, I thought I’d write a post covering flow control because it is important to understand. What [...]
Percona Live MySQL Conference 2013 wrap-up
April 29, 2013 By Leave a Comment
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
April 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment
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 [...]
The write cache: Swap insanity tome III
April 19, 2013 By 5 Comments
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 [...]
Is your MySQL buffer pool warm? Make it sweat!
April 16, 2013 By 6 Comments
Today’s blog post diving into the waters of the MySQL buffer pool is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog, and is Part 1 of 2. Thank you to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon for contributing to this project and post. We’ll be posting Part 2 on Thursday. I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and [...]
