May 23, 2013

Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013: The talks I want to see

I’ve been woefully neglectful of my responsibilities to post regularly about Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (PLCME 2013), but here’s some highlights of what I am planning to attend from the schedule.  Read to the very bottom for the chance to win a free full pass to the conference! When picking talks to attend, [...]

Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)

I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding.  They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]

Percona Toolkit version 2.1.6 released

The Percona Toolkit team is happy to announce the release of Percona Toolkit version 2.1.6. This is the sixth stable release in the 2.1 series, and primarily a bug-fix release; We suggest that users upgrade to the latest version of the tools. The complete list of changes is on the Launchpad milestone for 2.1.6, but [...]

devops webinar – follow up Q&A

First I wanted to thanks all the attendees and for the nice comments I got. As promised during the webinar, these are the answers of the questions you asked. Q: Does Percona provide plugin for cacti? A: Yes we do. They are part of Percona Monitoring Plugins. You can see some examples here. Q: What [...]

Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do

pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex.  Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities.  Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs.  The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]

Replaying database load with Percona Playback

If you are planning to upgrade or make any configuration change on your MySQL database the first advice usually is: – Benchmark! How should we do that benchmark? People usually run generic benchmark tools like sysbench, tpcc or mysqlslap that are good to know the number of transactions per seconds that a database can do [...]

Review of MySQL 5.6 Defaults Changes

James Day just posted the great summary of defaults changes in MySQL 5.6 compared to MySQL 5.5 In general there are a lot of good changes and many defaults are now computed instead of hardcoded. Though some of changes are rather puzzling for me. Lets go over them: back_log = 50 + ( max_connections / [...]

Announcing Percona Server 5.6.6-60.1 Alpha

Percona is glad to announce the ALPHA release of Percona Server 5.6.6-60.1 on September 14, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the EXPERIMENTAL Percona Software Repositories, although currently only for RHEL/CentOS as we are working on ensuring compatibility with our Debian/Ubuntu packages). Based on MySQL 5.6.6, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.6.6-60.1 is the second ALPHA release in [...]

Find unused indexes

I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]

MySQL Upgrade Webinar Questions Followup

I did a Webinar about MySQL Upgrade – Best Practices Yesterday and there were some questions we could not answer during Webinar, following Jay’s Lead I decided to post them as a Blog Post. Q: Can you go directly MySQL 5.0 to 5.5 for MyISAM tables? MyISAM have not been getting any significant development since [...]