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 [...]
Percona Toolkit versions 2.0.5 and 2.1.2 released
The Percona Toolkit team is happy to announce the release of Percona Toolkit versions 2.0.5 and 2.1.2. These are bug-fix releases in the 2.0 and 2.1 series, respectively. These releases fix many dozens of bugs, and we suggest that users upgrade to the latest versions of the tools. The complete list of changes is on [...]
Reasons for MySQL Replication Lag
One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]
Different flavors of InnoDB flushing
In my recent benchmarks, such as this one about the Virident TachIon card, I used different values for innodb_buffer_pool_size, like 13GB, 52GB, and 144GB, for testing the tpcc-mysql database with size 100G. This was needed in order to test different memory/dataset size ratios. But why is it important, and how does it affect how InnoDB works [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]
Data Corruption, DRBD and story of bug
Working with customer, I faced pretty nasty bug, which is actually not rare situation , but in this particular there are some lessons I would like to share. The case is pretty much described in bug 55981, or in pastebin. Everything below is related to InnoDB-plugin/XtraDB, but not to regular InnoDB ( i.e in MySQL [...]
The story of one MySQL Upgrade
I recently worked on upgrading MySQL from one of very early MySQL 5.0 versions to Percona Server 5.1. This was a classical upgrade scenario which can cause surprises. Master and few slaves need to be upgraded. It is a shared database used by tons of applications written by many people over more than 5 years [...]
Upgrading MySQL
Upgrading MySQL Server is a very interesting task as you can approach it with so much different “depth”. For some this is 15 minutes job for others it is many month projects. Why is that ? Performing MySQL upgrade two things should normally worry you. It is Regressions – functionality regressions when what you’ve been [...]
When would you use SAN with MySQL ?
One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?
KISS KISS KISS
When I visit customers quite often they tell me about number of creative techniques they heard on the conferences, read on the blogs, forums and Internet articles and they ask me if they should use them. My advice is frequently – do not. It is fun to be creative but creative solutions also means unproven [...]

