I wrote a post a while back that said why you don’t want to shard. In that post that I tried to explain that hardware advances such as 128G of RAM being so cheap is changing the point at which you need to shard, and that the (often omitted) operational issues created by sharding can [...]
Detailed review of Tokutek storage engine
(Note: Review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) I had a chance to take look TokuDB (the name of the Tokutek storage engine), and run some benchmarks. Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there only few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box [...]
Compression for InnoDB backup
Playing with last version of xtrabackup and compress it I noticed that gzip is unacceptable slow for both compression and decompression operations. Actually Peter wrote about it some time ago, but I wanted to review that data having some new information. In current multi-core word the compression utility should utilize several CPU to speedup operation, [...]
Should you move from MyISAM to Innodb ?
There is significant portion of customers which are still using MyISAM when they come to us, so one of the big questions is when it is feasible to move to Innodb and when staying on MyISAM is preferred ? I generally prefer to see Innodb as the main storage engine because it makes life much [...]
How Percona Develops Open-Source Software
Percona has been building and contributing to open-source software since the company was founded, and individually we’ve been doing the same thing for many years. We think it’s a huge value for our customers and the community. We’re involved in a dozen or so open-source projects, but our three core efforts at the moment are [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
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 [...]
Predicting Performance improvements from memory increase
One common question I guess is how much should I see performance improved in case I increase memory say from 16GB to 32GB. The benefit indeed can be very application dependent – if you have working set of say 30GB with uniform data access raising memory from 16GB to 32GB can improve performance order of [...]
How would you compress your MySQL Backup
Backing up MySQL Database most people compress them – which can make a good sense in terms of backup and recovery speed as well as space needed or be a serious bottleneck depending on circumstances and approach used. First I should mention this question mainly arises for medium and large size databases – for databases [...]
Tools
This page contains links to various tools we found helpful to use in practice. Some tools are written by us, others by third parties, yet another ones may be shipped with your operating system you just need to find they are there. Percona Toolkit Percona Toolkit is a great set of tools for MySQL Performance [...]

