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 [...]
Is Synchronous Replication right for your app?
I talk with lot of people who are really interested in Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and mostly they are interested in PXC as a high-availability solution. But, what they tend not to think too much about is if moving from async to synchronous replication is right for their application or not. Facts about Galera replication [...]
Galera Flow Control in Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL
Last week at Percona Live, I delivered a six-hour tutorial about Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL. I actually had more material than I covered (by design), but one thing I regret we didn’t cover was Flow control. So, I thought I’d write a post covering flow control because it is important to understand. What [...]
Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.0.3 for MySQL now available
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.0.3 for MySQL — high-quality components to add enterprise-grade MySQL monitoring and graphing capabilities to your existing in-house, on-premises monitoring solutions. The components are designed to integrate seamlessly with widely deployed solutions such as Nagios and Cacti, and are delivered in the form of [...]
Rotating MySQL slow logs safely
This blog post is part two of two. Like part one, published Wednesday, this is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog. Thanks again to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon. And one more reminder that I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo next week in Santa Clara, California so look for me there. You [...]
Testing the Micron P320h
The Micron P320h SSD is an SLC-based PCIe solid-state storage device which claims to provide the highest read throughput of any server-grade SSD, and at Micron’s request, I recently took some time to put the card through its paces, and the numbers are indeed quite impressive. For reference, the benchmarks for this device were performed [...]
Understanding the maximum number of columns in a MySQL table
This post was initially going to be two sets of polls: “What is the maximum number of columns in MySQL?” and “What is the minimum maximum number of columns in MySQL?”. Before you read on, ponder those questions and come up with your own answers… and see if you’re right or can prove me wrong! [...]
MySQL 5.6 – InnoDB Memcached Plugin as a caching layer
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 Compatible Percona Toolkit 2.2 Released
A new Percona Toolkit series has been released: Percona Toolkit 2.2 for MySQL 5.6. Several months in the making and many new features, changes, and improvements make this a great new series. It replaces the 2.1 series for which we plan to do only one more bug fix release (as 2.1.10) then retire. 2.2 is [...]
SimCity outages, traffic control and Thread Pool for MySQL
For this post I’m going to shamelessly exploit the litany of technical problems SimCity players encountered earlier this month and a few examples of how Thread Pool for MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL can help to prevent such incidents. Users of SimCity, a city-building and urban planning simulation video game, encountered network outages, issues with [...]

