May 24, 2013

MySQL Backup tools used by Percona Remote DBA for MySQL

As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic [...]

How does MySQL Replication really work?

While we do have many blog posts on replication on our blog, such as on replication being single-threaded, on semi-synchronous replication or on estimating replication capacity, I don’t think we have one that covers the very basics of how MySQL replication really works on the high level. Or it’s been so long ago I can’t [...]

Is there room for more MySQL IO Optimization?

I prefer to run MySQL with innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT in most cases – it makes sure there is no overhead of double buffering and I can save the limited amount of file system cache I would normally have on database server for those things which need to be cached — system files, binary log, FRM files, MySQL [...]

Intel 520 SSD in MySQL sysbench oltp benchmark

In my raw IO benchmark of Intel 520 SSD we saw that the drive does not provide uniform throughput and response time, but it is interesting how does it affect workload if it comes from MySQL. I prepared benchmarks results for Sysbench OLTP workload with MySQL running on Intel 520. You can download it there.

Percona Toolkit 2.1 with New Online Schema Change Tool

I’m proud to announce the GA release of version 2.1 of Percona Toolkit. Percona Toolkit is the essential suite of administrative tools for MySQL. With this release we introduce a new version of pt-online-schema-change, a tool that enables you to ALTER large tables with no blocking or downtime. As you know, MySQL locks tables for [...]

Benchmarks of Intel 320 SSD 600GB

I have a chance to test a system with Intel 320 SSD drives (NewRelic provided me with an access to the server), and compare performance with SAS hard drives.

Looking for RAID Controller without Battery Learning problems ?

A lot have been written about Battery Learning Cycle problems and its impact to MySQL Performance. Here are couple of links (1,2). It is good to see though there are some controllers coming out which solve this problem, namely Adaptec 5Z series controllers (Z stands for Zero Maintenance). This is not quite new technology they [...]

Intel 320 SSD read performance

(this is cross-post from http://www.ssdperformanceblog.com/) While PCI-e Flash cards show great performance, I am often asked about alternatives, as price for PCI-e cards is still significant and not acceptable for small companies and startups. Intel 320 SSD appears to be a popular drive with a quite acceptable price. I wrote about write performance of these [...]

Reasons for MySQL Replication Lag

One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks

In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]