I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.
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 [...]
Where does HandlerSocket really save you time?
HandlerSocket has really generated a lot of interest because of the dual promises of ease-of-use and blazing-fast performance. The performance comes from eliminating CPU consumption. Akira Higuchi’s HandlerSocket presentation from a couple of months back had some really good profile results for libmysql versus libhsclient (starting at slide 15). Somebody in the audience at Percona [...]
Modeling MySQL Capacity by Measuring Resource Consumptions
There are many angles you can look at the system to predict in performance, the model baron has published for example is good for measuring scalability of the system as concurrency growths. In many cases however we’re facing a need to answer a question how much load a given system can handle when load is [...]
Fixing MySQL with a comment in the config file
A customer called with an emergency issue: A server that normally runs many MySQL instances wouldn’t start them up. Not only would it not start all of them, it wouldn’t even start the first one. The multiple instances were started through the mysql_multi init script. Perhaps you already know what was wrong!
Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep
Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]
High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 2 – Setting up the initial instances
This post is the second of a series that started here. The first step to build the HA solution is to create two working instances, configure them to be EBS based and create a security group for them. A third instance, the client, will be discussed in part 7. Since this will be a proof [...]
NDB API examples, the trivia to make ndbapi_scan works!
When I did NDB Cluster engagements, it happened a few time that I had to cover the NDB API. Once, a customer asked an example on how to perform a simple scan. Remembering that some examples are within the NDB source tree, under ./storage/ndb/ndbapi-examples/ and I decided to take a look, why writing something when [...]
MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 3
This is part 3 of our series. In part 1 we talked about boosting performance with memcached on top of MySQL, in Part 2 we talked about running 100% outside the data with memcached, and now in Part 3 we are going to look at a possible solution to free you from the database. The [...]
Innodb performance gotcha w Larger queries.
Couple of days ago I was looking for a way to improve update performance for the application and I was replacing single value UPDATE with multiple value REPLACE (though I also saw the same problem with INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE) As I went from 1 value to 3 or 10 in the batch performance [...]

