May 18, 2013

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

March 11, 2013 By 7 Comments

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

Filed Under: MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6 (part 1)

February 26, 2013 By 1 Comment

I’ve never been a very big fan of MyISAM; I would argue that in most situations, any possible advantages to using MyISAM are far outweighed by the potential disadvantages and the strengths of InnoDB. However, up until MySQL 5.6, MyISAM was the only storage engine with support for full-text search (FTS). And I’ve encountered many [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

Percona Server on the Raspberry Pi: Your own MySQL Database Server for Under $80

February 25, 2013 By 10 Comments

There are many reasons for wanting a small MySQL database server: You’re a uni student who wants to learn the SQL language better and needs a mini-testbox You’re a Windows user who wants to play around with Percona Server on Linux You’re a corporate application developer who wants a small SQL development & test box [...]

Filed Under: Hardware and Storage, Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MySQL Tagged With: , , , ,

Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)

December 5, 2012 By 2 Comments

I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding.  They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL, Percona Software

Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do

November 1, 2012 By 1 Comment

pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex.  Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities.  Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs.  The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, Percona Software Tagged With:

Write contentions on the query cache

September 5, 2012 By 5 Comments

While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

August 16, 2012 By 4 Comments

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins

May 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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 [...]

Filed Under: Benchmarks, Insight for DBAs, MySQL Tagged With: , , , , ,

Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage

March 21, 2012 By 5 Comments

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 [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs, MySQL

Benchmarks of Intel 320 SSD 600GB

February 22, 2012 By 2 Comments

I have a chance to test a system with Intel 320 SSD drives (NewRelic provided me with an access to the server), and compare performance with SAS hard drives.

Filed Under: Benchmarks, Hardware and Storage, MySQL
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