A common practice to offload traffic from MySQL 5.6 is to use a caching layer to store expensive result sets or objects. Some typical use cases include: Complicated query result set (search results, recent users, recent posts, etc) Full page output (relatively static pages) Full objects (user or cart object built from several queries) Infrequently [...]
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. [...]
Announcing Percona Playback 0.5
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Playback 0.5 on November 26th, 2012. Downloads are available from our download site and Percona Software Repositories. Percona Playback is a tool for replaying the load of one database server to another. Currently it can read queries from MySQL query-log and tcpdump files and run them [...]
Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO
Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]
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 [...]
Percona Testing: Innodb crash / recovery tests available
Not everyone may know this, but there are precious few innodb crash recovery tests available. Some folks have noticed this and asked for something to be done about it, but unfortunately, no tests have been created for the main MySQL branch. The MySQL at Facebook branch has a number of tests that are quite interesting. [...]
InnoDB Flushing: a lot of memory and slow disk
You may have seen in the last couple of weekly news posts that Baron mentioned we are working on a new adaptive flushing algorithm in InnoDB. In fact, we already have three such algorithms in Percona Server (reflex, estimate, keep_average). Why do we need one more? Okay, first let me start by showing the current [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
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 [...]
Thinking about running OPTIMIZE on your Innodb Table ? Stop!
Innodb/XtraDB tables do benefit from being reorganized often. You can get data physically laid out in primary key order as well as get better feel for primary key and index pages and so using less space, it is just OPTIMIZE TABLE might not be best way to do it. If you’re running Innodb Plugin on [...]
The perils of uniform hardware and RAID auto-learn cycles
Last night a customer had an emergency in selected machines on a large cluster of quite uniform database servers. Some of the servers were slowing down in a very puzzling way over a short time span (a couple of hours). Queries were taking multiple seconds to execute instead of being practically instantaneous. But nothing seemed [...]

