I recently had to do some customer work involving the McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin and would like to share my experience in this post. Auditing user activity in MySQL has traditionally been challenging. Most data can be obtained from the slow or general log, but this involves a lot of data you don’t need too, and [...]
MySQL and the SSB – Part 2 – MyISAM vs InnoDB low concurrency
This blog post is part two in what is now a continuing series on the Star Schema Benchmark. In my previous blog post I compared MySQL 5.5.30 to MySQL 5.6.10, both with default settings using only the InnoDB storage engine. In my testing I discovered that innodb_old_blocks_time had an effect on performance of the benchmark. There was [...]
Percona XtraBackup 2.1.2 for MySQL available for download
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.1.2 for MySQL on May 18, 2013. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories. This release fixes number of high-priority bugs since version 2.1 became GA. It’s advised to upgrade your latest 2.1 version to 2.1.2. This release is the [...]
Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 2
This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]
Is Synchronous Replication right for your app?
I talk with lot of people who are really interested in Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and mostly they are interested in PXC as a high-availability solution. But, what they tend not to think too much about is if moving from async to synchronous replication is right for their application or not. Facts about Galera replication [...]
Open Source, the MySQL market (and TokuDB in particular)
I was reviewing the Percona Live sponsors list the other day and pondering the potential success stories associated with this product or that one…. and as I was preparing to put more thought on the topic, a PlanetMySQL post caught my eye. It was penned by Mike Hogan and titled, “Thoughts on Xeround and Free!” [...]
MySQL and Percona Server in LinkBench benchmark
Around month ago Facebook has announced the Linkbench benchmark that models the social graph OLTP workload. Sources, along with a very nice description of how to setup and run this benchmark, can be found here. We decided to run this benchmark for MySQL Server 5.5.30, 5.6.11 and Percona Server 5.5.30 and check how these servers [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL and encrypted Galera replication
Few people realize that Galera/Percona XtraDB (PXC) replication can be encrypted via SSL for secure transfer of your replicated data. Setting this up is actually quite easy to do and probably will look familiar to a lot of people. Setting up SSL and Galera Create and propagate a single key/cert pair First, we create a [...]
Percona Server 5.5.30 with TokuDB for MySQL
I was excited to see that TokuDB for MySQL from Tokutek is now open source. I believe this is a great technology and it was a significant restriction on the adoption when it was distributed only in a binary format with a proprietary license. So I went and built Percona Server 5.5.30 with TokuDB’s storage [...]
High-load problems? Investigate them with ‘pt-query-digest’
I had the chance to work on an interesting case last week, and I thought I’d share what I think is a little known goodie from Percona Toolkit for MySQL called pt-query-digest. One customer was suffering from periods of high load on their database server, leading to degraded application performance, and sometimes even short moments [...]

