May 25, 2013

MySQL and the SSB – Part 2 – MyISAM vs InnoDB low concurrency

This blog post is part two in what is now a continuing series on the Star Schema Benchmark. In my previous blog post I compared MySQL 5.5.30 to MySQL 5.6.10, both with default settings using only the InnoDB storage engine.  In my testing I discovered that innodb_old_blocks_time had an effect on performance of the benchmark.  There was [...]

Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 2

This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

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 [...]

Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields

Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]

Benchmarking single-row insert performance on Amazon EC2

I have been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and I have some interesting results that I wanted to share. I used a nice and effective tool iiBench which has been developed by Tokutek. Though the “1 billion row insert challenge” for which this tool was originally built is long over, [...]

Multi Range Read (MRR) in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5

This is the second blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is aimed at the optimizer enhancement Multi Range Read (MRR). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 Now let’s take a look at [...]

How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins

In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]

Troubleshooting MySQL Upgrade Performance Regressions

So lets say you upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to Percona Server 5.5 and instead of expected performance improvement you see your performance being worse. What should you do ? First if you followed MySQL upgrade best practices such as testing your workload with pt-upgrade the chances of this happening are rather slim. But lets assume [...]