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 [...]
MariaDB 5.3.4 benchmarks
MariaDB 5.3 has reached the release candidate milestone, and the 5.3 version promises a lot of new features and optimization (i.e in optimizer http://kb.askmonty.org/en/what-is-mariadb-53#query-optimizer). No surprise I wanted to check how all improvements affect general performance. So I why don’t we run old good sysbench benchmark.
linux.conf.au 2012 roundup
I spent last week at linux.conf.au in Ballarat, Victoria (that’s the Victoria in Australia, not wherever else there may be one) which is only a pleasant two hour drive from my home town of Melbourne (Australia, not Florida). I sent an email internally to our experts detailing bits of the conference that may interest them [...]
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. [...]
Avoiding auto-increment holes on InnoDB with INSERT IGNORE
Are you using InnoDB tables on MySQL version 5.1.22 or newer? If so, you probably have gaps in your auto-increment columns. A simple INSERT IGNORE query creates gaps for every ignored insert, but this is undocumented behaviour. This documentation bug is already submitted. Firstly, we will start with a simple question. Why do we have [...]
Sphinx 2.0.2 Beta is released, Sphinx Users Conference in December
My friends at Sphinx Technologies have finally released new beta of Sphinx – Sphinx 2.0.2. It includes about 6 months of development and includes over 30 new features and tons of bug fixes. I’m happy to see how Sphinx 2.0 is shaping up a lot of rough corners are being polished and I’m hopeful we [...]
Fishing with dynamite, brought to you by the randgen and dbqp
I tend to speak highly of the random query generator as a testing tool and thought I would share a story that shows how it can really shine. At our recent dev team meeting, we spent approximately 30 minutes of hack time to produce test cases for 3 rather hard to duplicate bugs. Of course, [...]
dbqp and Xtrabackup testing
So I’m back from the Percona dev team’s recent meeting. While there, we spent a fair bit of time discussing Xtrabackup development. One of our challenges is that as we add richer features to the tool, we need equivalent testing capabilities. However, it seems a constant in the MySQL world that available QA tools often [...]
Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance
When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]
Looking for InnoDB/XtraDB hacker
We are happy to see that Percona Server/XtraDB and XtraBackup are raising popularity and to keep excitement we want to have more features and more performance fixes! If you are experienced software engineer and feel strong enough to hack InnoDB/XtraDB code we invite you to join our development team to work on the following (but [...]

