Percona Live London starts on Monday, so this is the last in the series of free-Percona-Live tickets we’ll give away. But first — have you ever wondered what servers are in your MySQL replication hierarchy? We have, too. As consultants, a lot of times we need to get a quick overview of the whole replication [...]
When Does InnoDB Update Table Statistics? (And When It Can Bite)
October 6, 2011 By 7 Comments
An InnoDB table statistics is used for JOIN optimizations and helping the MySQL optimizer choose the appropriate index for a query. If a table’s statistics or index cardinality becomes outdated, you might see queries which previously performed well suddenly show up on slow query log until InnoDB again updates the statistics. But when does InnoDB [...]
This week’s TGIF Percona Live ticket giveaway
September 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
It’s Friday again (already?) and as usual, we have a free ticket for Percona Live London. This time Tokutek is doing the honors of running the contest and selecting the winner. Instructions for entering the contest are on their blog, at the top of my recent guest post about covering indexes.
Win a free ticket to RailsConf!
May 15, 2011 By 10 Comments
I have one free ticket to give away to RailsConf next week in Baltimore! Post a comment to win, and if you aren’t the winner, I’ll give you a discount code for Percona Live as a consolation prize. Here’s the catch: you have to find at least one thing wrong with the following typical logrotate [...]
The two even more fundamental performance metrics
May 5, 2011 By 6 Comments
In a recent blog post, I wrote about four fundamental metrics for system performance analysis. These are throughput, residence time, “weighted time” (the sum of all residence times in the observation period — the terminology is mine for lack of a better name), and concurrency. I derived all of these metrics from two “even more [...]
Percona Live NYC Schedule Posted
April 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The first Percona Live conference in San Francisco in February was a huge success, and we’re planning to run several each year. The next one is May 26th in New York City. We’ve just confirmed a number of sought-after speakers and posted the schedule online. We are in the process of confirming sessions from a [...]
Innodb row size limitation
April 7, 2011 By 12 Comments
I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.
Virtualization and IO Modes = Extra Complexity
March 21, 2011 By 12 Comments
It has taken a years to get a proper integration between operating system kernel, device driver and hardware to get behavior with caches and IO modes correctly. I remember us having a lot of troubles with fsync() not flushing hard drive write cache and so potential hard drives can be lost on power failure. Happily [...]
Is VoltDB really as scalable as they claim?
February 28, 2011 By 3 Comments
Before I begin, a disclaimer. VoltDB is not a customer, and did not pay Percona or me to investigate VoltDB’s scalability or publish this blog post. More disclaimers at the end. Short version: VoltDB is very scalable; it should scale to 120 partitions, 39 servers, and 1.6 million complex transactions per second at over 300 [...]
Death match! EBS versus SSD price, performance, and QoS
February 21, 2011 By 55 Comments
Is it a good idea to deploy your database into the cloud? It depends. I have seen it work well many times, and cause trouble at other times. In this blog post I want to examine cloud-based I/O. I/O matters a lot when a) the database’s working set is bigger than the server’s memory, or [...]
