On Saturday July 16, Percona suffered a catastrophic failure of three disks on our primary web server. This was compounded by unexpected problems in recovery from our backups arising from staff changes. The net result is that several Percona web properties were offline from several hours to several days and that our cleanup continues. Interruptions [...]
What’s a good buffer pool read/write ratio?
May 31, 2011 By 6 Comments
At Percona Live last week, someone showed me a graph from their Cacti monitoring system, using the templates that I wrote. It was the buffer pool pages read, written, and created. He asked me if the graph was okay. Shouldn’t there be a lot more pages read than written, he asked? It’s a great question. [...]
Percona Server and XtraBackup Weekly News, April 25th
April 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Time for our weekly review of the news! The big news this week is that Percona XtraBackup is ready to try out on Windows. Otherwise, there’s just more steady progress. One quick note, sort of a “to whom it may concern,” is that the proper trademarked names of our products include “Percona Server”, “Percona XtraDB”, [...]
MySQL caching methods and tips
April 4, 2011 By 5 Comments
“The least expensive query is the query you never run.” Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding [...]
Two quick site updates: videos online; Kindle edition
March 22, 2011 By 12 Comments
Two notes for readers. First, we have been publishing a great deal of video material on our companion site Percona.TV. This includes our recordings from past conferences, user group meetings, screencasts, and most recently our webinars. (I hate the proprietary formats and silly technical restrictions that the webinar companies impose. I figured out how to [...]
What Causes Downtime in MySQL?
March 21, 2011 By 10 Comments
We’ve just published a new white paper analyzing the causes of emergency incidents filed by our customers. The numbers contradict the urban myth that bad SQL is the most common problem in databases. There are a number of surprises in other areas, too, such as the causes of data loss. This is the companion to [...]
Percona Server and XtraBackup weekly news, March 19th
March 20, 2011 By 2 Comments
Here’s what is new in Percona Server and Percona XtraBackup since last week. We are working on compiling and checking download statistics for both pieces of software. The preliminary numbers are far higher than I thought they would be. Both Percona Server and XtraBackup are becoming amazingly popular. I am aware of deployments running into [...]
Is VoltDB really as scalable as they claim?
February 28, 2011 By 3 Comments
Before I begin, a disclaimer. VoltDB is not a customer, and did not pay Percona or me to investigate VoltDB’s scalability or publish this blog post. More disclaimers at the end. Short version: VoltDB is very scalable; it should scale to 120 partitions, 39 servers, and 1.6 million complex transactions per second at over 300 [...]
White Paper: “Scaling MySQL Deployments Efficiently” from Percona and Virident
February 7, 2011 By 2 Comments
Percona was working closely with Virident on evaluating tachIOn as solution for MySQL, and as result you can find whitepaper “Scaling MySQL Deployments Efficiently Using Virident tachIOn Drives”, available from Virident website. It was done as part of our consulting practice, but all results and numbers are certified by Percona. I personally really enjoyed performance [...]
Sample datasets for benchmarking and testing
February 1, 2011 By 17 Comments
Sometimes you just need some data to test and stress things. But randomly generated data is awful — it doesn’t have realistic distributions, and it isn’t easy to understand whether your results are meaningful and correct. Real or quasi-real data is best. Whether you’re looking for a couple of megabytes or many terabytes, the following [...]
