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 [...]
Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views
Is VoltDB really as scalable as they claim?
Before I begin, a disclaimer. VoltDB is not a customer, and did not pay Percona or me to investigate VoltDB’s scalability or publish this blog post. More disclaimers at the end. Short version: VoltDB is very scalable; it should scale to 120 partitions, 39 servers, and 1.6 million complex transactions per second at over 300 [...]
Percona Server 5.5.8 Beta Release
It’s finally here! Percona Server Percona Server 5.5.8-20.0 is now available for download. This is a beta release of Percona’s enhancements to the MySQL 5.5.8 server. Here are some highlights: Performance and scalability improvements throughout the server and storage engine Optimizations for flash storage such as SSD, Virident, and FusionIO Optimizations for cloud computing The [...]
Percona Welcomes Justin Swanhart
Percona is pleased to officially welcome Justin Swanhart to our team of consultants. Before joining Percona, Justin worked as a MySQL DBA at Gazillion, Yahoo, and Kickfire. Justin has become a regular contributor here on the MySQL Performance Blog as well as being an active blogger at http://swanhart.livejournal.com/. He is very active in the community, [...]
Debugging problems with row based replication
MySQL 5.1 introduces row based binary logging. In fact, the default binary logging format in GA versions of MySQL 5.1 is ‘MIXED’ STATEMENT*; The binlog_format variable can still be changed per sessions which means it is possible that some of your binary log entries will be written in a row-based fashion instead of the [...]
Percona-XtraDB-9.1: released and new coming features
Recently Alexandr announced new Percona-XtraDB-9.1 release, and now it is good time to summarize features we have and what is expected soon. This release contains long waited features from 5.0: extended slow.log USER/TABLE/INDEX/CLIENT_STATISTICS + THREAD_STATISTICS ( coming in release-10) Extended slow.log is now even more extended, there is additional information for each query:
1 | # Bytes_sent: 4973 Tmp_tables: 1 Tmp_disk_tables: 1 Tmp_table_sizes: 7808 |
That [...]
Introducing percona-patches for 5.1
Our patches for 5.0 have attracted significant interest. You can read about SecondLife’s experience here, as well as what Flickr had to say on their blog. The main improvements come in both performance gains and improvements to diagnostics (such as the improvements to the slow log output, and INDEX_STATISTICS). Despite having many requests to port [...]
Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB
Accidentally me and Baron played with InfoBright (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/09/29/quick-comparison-of-myisam-infobright-and-monetdb/) this week. And following Baron’s example I also run the same load against MonetDB. Reading comments to Baron’s post I tied to load the same data to LucidDB, but I was not successful in this. I tried to analyze a bigger dataset and I took public [...]
A micro-benchmark of stored routines in MySQL
Ever wondered how fast stored routines are in MySQL? I just ran a quick micro-benchmark to compare the speed of a stored function against a “roughly equivalent” subquery. The idea — and there may be shortcomings that are poisoning the results here, your comments welcome — is to see how fast the SQL procedure code [...]
PROCEDURE ANALYSE
Quite common task during schema review is to find the optimal data type for the column value – for example column is defined as INT but is it really needed or may be SMALLINT or even TINYINT will do instead. Does it contain any NULLs or it can be defined NOT NULL which reduces space [...]

