May 23, 2013

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks

In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Theory

Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at [...]

The case for getting rid of duplicate “sets”

The most useful feature of the relational database is that it allows us to easily process data in sets, which can be much faster than processing it serially. When the relational database was first implemented, write-ahead-logging and other technologies did not exist. This made it difficult to implement the database in a way that matched [...]

Shard-Query EC2 images available

Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]

Introducing our Percona Live speakers

We have mostly finalized the Percona Live schedule at this point, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to introduce who’s going to be speaking and what they’ll cover. A brief explanation first: we’ve personally recruited the speakers, which is why it has been a slow process to finalize and get abstracts on the [...]

Optimizing slow web pages with mk-query-digest

I don’t use many tools in my consulting practice but for the ones I do, I try to know them as best as I can. I’ve been using mk-query-digest for almost as long as it exists but it continues to surprise me in ways I couldn’t imagine it would. This time I’d like to share [...]

Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views

Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]

How Percona strives to remain neutral and independent

Many of the prominent companies in the MySQL ecosystem are Percona customers, including hardware manufacturers, software developers, hosted service providers, and appliance developers. We perform paid and unpaid research on their products, and we publish blog posts related to their products or services. Independence and objectivity are core Percona values. How do we balance the [...]

Effect from innodb log block size 4096 bytes

In my post MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive I mentioned that I used innodb-log-block-size=4096 in Percona Server to get better throughput, but later Dimitri in his article MySQL Performance: Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5 sounded doubt that it really makes sense. Here us quote from his article: “Question: what is a [...]

MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on Fast Flash card (Virident tachIOn)

This is to follow up on my previous post and show the results for MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on the fastest hardware I have in our lab: a Cisco UCS C250 server with 384GB of RAM, powered by a Virident tachIOn 400GB SLC card. To see different I/O patterns, I used different innodb_buffer_pool_size settings: 13G, [...]