I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]
Moving from MyISAM to Innodb or XtraDB. Basics
I do not know if it is because we’re hosting a free webinar on migrating MyISAM to Innodb or some other reason but recently I see a lot of questions about migration from MyISAM to Innodb. Webinar will cover the process in a lot more details though I would like to go over basics in [...]
Scaling: Consider both Size and Load
So lets imagine you have the server handling 100.000 user accounts. You can see the CPU,IO and Network usage is below 10% of capacity – does it mean you can count on server being able to handle 1.000.000 of accounts ? Not really, and there are few reasons why, I’ll name most important of them: [...]
Is your server’s performance about to degrade?
I’ve been talking and writing a bit lately about the scaling problems I’m seeing on fast servers running lots of queries. As a rough guide, I’m seeing this in servers running 20k queries per second and higher, lots of memory, lots of CPU cores, and most queries are running faster than one millisecond; some in [...]
The Doom of Multiple Storage Engines
One of the big “Selling Points” of MySQL is support for Multiple Storage engines, and from the glance view it is indeed great to provide users with same top level SQL interface allowing them to store their data many different way. As nice as it sounds the in theory this benefit comes at very significant [...]
Which adaptive should we use?
As you may know, InnoDB has 2 limits for unflushed modified blocks in the buffer pool. The one is from physical size of the buffer pool. And the another one is oldness of the block which is from the capacity of transaction log files. In the case of heavy updating workload, the modified ages of [...]
Looking at Redis
Recently I had a chance to take a look at Redis project, which is semi-persistent in memory database with idea somethat similar to memcache but richer feature set. Redis has simple single process event driven design, which means it does not have to deal with any locks which is performance killer for a lot of [...]
How much memory can MySQL use in the worst case?
I vaguely recall a couple of blog posts recently asking something like “what’s the formula to compute mysqld’s worst-case maximum memory usage?” Various formulas are in wide use, but none of them is fully correct. Here’s why: you can’t write an equation for it.
Living with backups
Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]
State of MySQL Market and will Replication live ?
There are interesting posts these day about future of MySQL Replication by Brian Frank and Arjen. I think it very interesting to take a look at a bit bigger picture using framework from Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution. I’m not going to speak about disruption and commoditisation of Database Market, leaving this for Market talks, [...]

