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 [...]
Identifying the load with the help of pt-query-digest and Percona Server
December 29, 2011 By 3 Comments
Overview Profiling, analyzing and then fixing queries is likely the most oft-repeated part of a job of a DBA and one that keeps evolving, as new features are added to the application new queries pop up that need to be analyzed and fixed. And there are not too many tools out there that can make [...]
Multiple purge threads in Percona Server 5.1.56 and MySQL 5.6.2
May 3, 2011 By 13 Comments
Part of the InnoDB duties, being an MVCC-implementing storage engine, is to get rid of–purge–the old versions of the records as they become obsolete. In MySQL 5.1 this is done by the master InnoDB thread. Since then, InnoDB has been moving towards the parallelized purge: in MySQL 5.5 there is an option to have a [...]
Innodb row size limitation
April 7, 2011 By 12 Comments
I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.
How InnoDB handles REDO logging
February 3, 2011 By 19 Comments
Xaprb (Baron) recently blogged about how InnoDB performs a checkpoint , I thought it might be useful to explain another important mechanism that affects both response time and throughput – The transaction log.
Reasons for run-away main Innodb Tablespace
June 10, 2010 By 2 Comments
So you’re running MySQL With innodb_file_per_table option but your ibdata1 file which holds main (or system) tablespace have grown dramatically from its starting 10MB size. What could be the reason of this growth and what you can do about it ? There are few things which are always stored in main tablespace – these are [...]
Joining on range? Wrong!
May 17, 2010 By 10 Comments
The problem I am going to describe is likely to be around since the very beginning of MySQL, however unless you carefully analyse and profile your queries, it might easily go unnoticed. I used it as one of the examples in our talk given at phpDay.it conference last week to demonstrate some pitfalls one may [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
November 20, 2009 By 2 Comments
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
Air traffic queries in InfiniDB: early alpha
November 2, 2009 By 19 Comments
As Calpont announced availability of InfiniDB I surely couldn’t miss a chance to compare it with previously tested databases in the same environment. See my previous posts on this topic: Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB Air traffic queries in LucidDB I could not run all queries against InfiniDB and I met some [...]
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
December 22, 2008 By 13 Comments
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]
