As Mark pointed out, there isn’t a lot of detail in the release notes about what could potentially be a very serious problem that is fixed in MySQL 5.1.60. I’ll repeat here the full documentation from the release notes: “InnoDB Storage Engine: Data from BLOB columns could be lost if the server crashed at a precise [...]
dbqp and Xtrabackup testing
November 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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 [...]
When EXPLAIN estimates can go wrong!
October 13, 2011 By 7 Comments
I have been working with a few customer cases and one interesting case popped up. The customer was facing a peculiar problem where the rows column in the EXPLAIN output of the query was totally off. The actual number of rows was 18 times more than the number of rows reported by MySQL in the [...]
Dynamic row format for MEMORY tables
September 6, 2011 By 5 Comments
The latest Percona Server release has one new feature: now MEMORY tables can have BLOB and TEXT columns, and VARCHAR columns will not waste space due to implicit extension to CHAR.
Free Percona Live tickets and Percona Support contract!
May 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Just a couple of announcements for Percona Live: we’re giving away free tickets through Engine Yard, and we’ve arranged our evening open-bar event. For a chance to win a free ticket, check out the guest blog post I wrote for Engine Yard on how to make Rails migrations faster and safer. In other news, Percona [...]
MySQL on Amazon RDS part 1: insert performance
March 15, 2011 By 37 Comments
Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) is a cloud-hosted MySQL solution. I’ve had some clients hitting performance limitations on standard EC2 servers with EBS volumes (see SSD versus EBS death match), and one of them wanted to evaluate RDS as a replacement. It is built on the same technologies, but the hardware and networking are supposed [...]
Moving Subtrees in Closure Table Hierarchies
February 14, 2011 By 18 Comments
Many software developers find they need to store hierarchical data, such as threaded comments, personnel org charts, or nested bill-of-materials. Sometimes it’s tricky to do this in SQL and still run efficient queries against the data. I’ll be presenting a webinar for Percona on February 28 at 9am PST. I’ll describe several solutions for storing [...]
MySQL & Friends Meetup @ FOSDEM
January 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Kris Buytaert organized a MySQL Meetup at FOSDEM last year, and because of the success we’ll be doing it again this year, in the same restaurant: Sogno d’Italia. Everybody is invited to come to the dinner. Just register on http://mysqlandfriendsfosdem2011.eventbrite.com/ so we have an idea how many reservations we should make. The maximum capacity is about 40 people. We’ll plan [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
January 8, 2011 By 4 Comments
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 [...]
MySQL Partitioning – can save you or kill you
December 11, 2010 By 44 Comments
I wanted for a while to write about using MySQL Partitioning for Performance Optimization and I just got a relevant customer case to illustrate it. First you need to understand how partitions work internally. Partitions are on the low level are separate table. This means when you’re doing lookup by partitioned key you will look [...]
