I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]
Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.0.1
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0.1 on June 25th, 2012. Downloads are available from our download site and Percona Software Repositories. This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.0 series. This release contains over 20 fixed bugs, some of the more significant bugs fixed are: [...]
A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins
MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage
One of the most painful troubleshooting tasks with MySQL is troubleshooting memory usage. The problem usually starts like this – you have configured MySQL to use reasonable global buffers, such as innodb_buffer_size, key_buffer_size etc, you have reasonable amount of connections but yet MySQL takes much more memory than you would expect, causing swapping or other [...]
Index Condition Pushdown in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 and its performance impact
I have been working with Peter in preparation for the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. We are taking a look at and benchmarking optimizer enhancements one by one. So in the same way this blog post is aimed at a new optimizer enhancement Index Condition Pushdown (ICP). Its available [...]
Introducing new type of benchmark
Traditionally the most benchmarks are focusing on throughput. We all get used to that, and in fact in our benchmarks, sysbench and tpcc-mysql, the final result is also represents the throughput (transactions per second in sysbench; NewOrder transactions Per Minute in tpcc-mysql). However, like Mark Callaghan mentioned in comments, response time is way more important [...]
Announcing Drizzle Day, Fri 13th April 2012
Percona is proud to sponsor the 4th Drizzle Day, this year being held on the 13th April, the day after the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. When: Friday, April 13th 2012 from 9:30 am Where: Cypress room, Mezzanine Level, Hyatt Regency Santa Clara (5101 Great America Parkway) What: Drizzle Day is a day to learn about Drizzle, how [...]
MySQL Configuration Wizard Updated
We’ve released an updated version of the MySQL Configuration Wizard we announced at the end of last year. If you don’t remember that announcement, here’s the short version: this is a tool to help you generate my.cnf files based on your server’s hardware and other characteristics. We’ve gotten really good feedback on this tool, including [...]
Is your MySQL Application having Busy IO by Oracle Measures ?
Preparing Choosing Storage Systems for MySQL talk for Percona Live in Washington,DC I ran into great paper called Sane SAN 2010 by James Morle from Scale Abilities – and Oracle consulting company. It is worth to read for variety of reason yet for this post I wanted to mention what James calls “Busy” Oracle database [...]
Announcing PAM authentication plugin for MySQL (early access release)
We are pleased to announce availability of an early access version of Percona’s PAM Authentication plugin for MySQL. This plugin supports MySQL-5.5.x, Percona Server 5.5.x and MariaDB 5.2.x. The PAM Authentication plugin can be used for: MySQL authentication using operating system users (pam_unix) MySQL authentication from LDAP server (pam_ldap) authentication against RSA SecurID server any [...]

