When does Innodb Start Transaction ? The answer looks obvious – when you issue “BEGIN” command. This is however wrong answer from engine point of you. Run “SHOW INNODB STATUS” and you will see “not started” status in transaction list. It is only when you read (or write) to INNODB table you can see transaction [...]
Shard-Query adds parallelism to queries
Preamble: On performance, workload and scalability: MySQL has always been focused on OLTP workloads. In fact, both Percona Server and MySQL 5.5.7rc have numerous performance improvements which benefit workloads that have high concurrency. Typical OLTP workloads feature numerous clients (perhaps hundreds or thousands) each reading and writing small chunks of data. The recent improvements to [...]
EXPLAIN EXTENDED can tell you all kinds of interesting things
While many people are familiar with the MySQL EXPLAIN command, fewer people are familiar with “extended explain” which was added in MySQL 4.1 EXPLAIN EXTENDED can show you what the MySQL optimizer does to your query. You might not know this, but MySQL can dramatically change your query before it actually executes it. This process [...]
FlashCache: tpcc workload with FusionIO card as cache
This run is very similar what I had on Intel SSD X25-M card, but now I use FusionIO 80GB SLC card. I chose this card as smallest available card (and therefore cheapest. On Dell.com you can see it for about $3K). There is also FusionIO IO-Xtreme 80GB card, which is however MLC based and it [...]
Community Events February-March
February and March as busy months for Community events. There’s MySQL University, Fosdem, the Seattle MySQL Meetup & Confoo.ca.
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
Tokyo Tyrant -The Extras Part III : Write Bottleneck
This is part 3 of my Tyrant extra’s, part 1 focused on durability, part 2 focused on the perceived performance wall. #3. Tokyo Cabinet Can have only a single writer thread, bottlenecking performance When writing an application using Tokyo Cabinet only one connection can be opened as a “writerâ€Â while the rest are readers. Tyrant [...]
Finding your MySQL High-Availability solution – The questions
After having reviewed the definition my the previous post (The definitions), the next step is to respond to some questions. Do you need MySQL High-Availability? That question is quite obvious but some times, it is skipped. It can also be formulated “What is the downtime cost of the service?”. In the cost, you need to [...]
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 [...]
Tuning for heavy writing workloads
For the my previous post, there was comment to suggest to test db_STRESS benchmark on XtraDB by Dimitri. And I tested and tuned for the benchmark. I will show you the tunings. It should be also tuning procedure for general heavy writing workloads. At first, <tuning peak performance>. The next, <tuning purge operation> to stabilize [...]

