Over the last months I’ve seen lots of customers trying to tune the thread concurrency inside MySQL with the variable thread_concurrency. Our advice is: stop wasting your time, it does nothing on GNU/Linux Some of the biggest GNU/Linux distributions includes the variable thread_concurrency in their my.cnf file by default. One example is Debian and its [...]
A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins
MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]
Testing Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duo
I was lucky enough to get my hands on new Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duo card. So I decided to run the same series of tests I did for other Flash devices. This is ioDrive2 Duo 2.4TB card and it is visible to OS as two devices (1.2TB each), which can be connected together via software RAID. [...]
Testing STEC SSD MACH16 200GB SLC
Following my previous benchmark of Samsung 830, today I want to show results for STEC MACH16 SATA card, 200GB size, this card is based on SLC, and regarding STEC website, it is an enterprise grade storage.
Testing Samsung SSD SATA 256GB 830 – not all SSD created equal
I personally like PCIe based Flash, but from a pricing point our customers are looking for cheaper alternatives. SATA SSD is an options. There is many products based on MLC technology, and Intel 320 I would say is the most popular. I do not particularly like its write performance – I wrote about it before, [...]
Join Optimizations in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5
This is the third blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is targeted at the join related optimizations introduced in the optimizer. These optimizations are available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5, and MariaDB 5.5 [...]
ext4 vs xfs on SSD
As ext4 is a standard de facto filesystem for many modern Linux system, I am getting a lot of question if this is good for SSD, or something else (i.e. xfs) should be used. Traditionally our recommendation is xfs, and it comes to known problem in ext3, where IO gets serialized per i_node in O_DIRECT [...]
Percona testing: Quick test clusters with kewpie!
The announcement of Percona XtraDB Cluster seems to have generated a fair bit of interest : ) Although the documentation contains more formal instructions for setting up a test cluster, I wanted to share a quick way to set up an ad-hoc cluster on a single machine to help people play with this (imho) rather [...]
How To Test Your Upgrades – pt-upgrade
Upgrades are usually one of the biggest part of any database infrastructure maintenance. Even with enough planning something else can go bad after sending your production application to the version you’ve upgraded to. Let’s look at how one Percona Toolkit tool, pt-upgrade can help you identify what to expect and test your upgrades better which [...]
Optimizing InnoDB for creating 30,000 tables (and nothing else)
Once upon a time, it would have been considered madness to even attempt to create 30,000 tables in InnoDB. That time is now a memory. We have customers with a lot more tables than a mere 30,000. There have historically been no tests for anything near this many tables in the MySQL test suite. So, [...]

