Global Transactions Identifiers are one of the new features regarding replication in MySQL 5.6. They open up a lot of opportunities to make the life of DBAs much easier when having to maintain servers under a specific replication topology. However you should keep in mind some limitations of the current implementation. This post is the [...]
Percona Live MySQL Conference 2013 wrap-up
The Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2013 was April 22-25 in Santa Clara, California. This was Percona’s second year organizing the conference and we were very pleased with the event and the feedback (check the #perconalive hashtag for a sampling of the great comments such as this from Tom Krouper or this from John [...]
More on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization
Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]
Why MySQL Performance at Low Concurrency is Important
A few weeks ago I wrote about “MySQL Performance at High Concurrency” and why it is important, which was followed up by Vadim’s post on ThreadPool in Percona Server providing some great illustration on the topic. This time I want to target an opposite question: why MySQL performance at low concurrency is important for you. [...]
MySQL 5.6.10 Optimizer Limitations: Index Condition Pushdown
While preparing the webinar I will deliver this Friday, I ran into a quite interesting (although not very impacting) optimizer issue: a “SELECT *” taking half the time to execute than the same “SELECT one_indexed_column” query in MySQL 5.6.10. This turned into a really nice exercise for checking the performance and inner workings of one [...]
MySQL Backup tools used by Percona Remote DBA for MySQL
As part of Percona Remote DBA for MySQL service we recognize that reliable backups are one of the most important things we can bring to the table. In my experience handling emergencies, the single worst thing that can happen is finding out you don’t have backups available when some sort of data loss or catastrophic [...]
Logging Foreign Key errors
In the last blog post I wrote about how to log deadlock errors using Percona Toolkit. Foreign key errors have the same problems. InnoDB only logs the last error in the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS, so we need another similar tool in order to have historical data. pt-fk-error-logger This is a tool very [...]
The Math of Automated Failover
There are number of people recently blogging about MySQL automated failover, based on production incident which GitHub disclosed. Here is my take on it. When we look at systems providing high availability we can identify 2 cases of system breaking down. First is when the system itself has a bug or limitations which does not [...]
DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL
Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]
Introducing new type of benchmark
Traditionally the most benchmarks are focusing on throughput. We all get used to that, and in fact in our benchmarks, sysbench and tpcc-mysql, the final result is also represents the throughput (transactions per second in sysbench; NewOrder transactions Per Minute in tpcc-mysql). However, like Mark Callaghan mentioned in comments, response time is way more important [...]

