May 22, 2013

Why you don’t want to shard.

August 6, 2009 By 34 Comments

Note: This blog post is part 1 of 4 on building our training workshop.

The Percona training workshop will not cover sharding. If you follow our blog, you’ll notice we don’t talk much about the subject; in some cases it makes sense, but in many we’ve seen that it causes architectures to be prematurely complicated.

So let me state it: You don’t want to shard.

Optimize everything else first, and then if performance still isn’t good enough, it’s time to take a very bitter medicine. The reason you need to shard basically comes down to one of these two reasons

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

When would you use SAN with MySQL ?

March 9, 2009 By 18 Comments

One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?

Filed Under: Hardware and Storage Tagged With:

SSD, XFS, LVM, fsync, write cache, barrier and lost transactions

March 2, 2009 By 32 Comments

We finally managed to get Intel X25-E SSD drive into our lab. I attached it to our Dell PowerEdge R900. The story making it running is worth separate mentioning – along with Intel X25-E I got HighPoint 2300 controller and CentOS 5.2 just could not start with two RAID controllers (Perc/6i and HighPoint 2300). The [...]

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Percona is hiring performance experts

February 13, 2009 By 2 Comments

Percona is hiring. We’ve added several experts recently and we’re growing at a fast but sustainable pace. The demand for our services is strong, and we have openings for more experts in the next couple of months. Let me explain a little about what we’re looking for at the moment. While we do have a [...]

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How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

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Living with backups

November 6, 2008 By 28 Comments

Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]

Filed Under: Insight for DBAs Tagged With: , ,

How network can impact MySQL Operations ?

September 1, 2008 By 5 Comments

This week I’ve worked with the customer doing certain work during maintenance window which involved a lot of data copying around between MySQL boxes. We had prepared well and had measured how fast we could copy the data between servers of these kind connected to the same network, and we did the same thing before. [...]

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Rendundant Array of Inexpensive Servers

August 21, 2008 By 15 Comments

So you need to design highly available MySQL powered system… how do you approach that ? Too often I see the question is approached by focusing on expensive hardware which in theory should be reliable. And this really can work quite well for small systems. It is my experience – with quality commodity hardware (Dell,HP,IBM [...]

Filed Under: Hardware and Storage Tagged With:

Estimating Undo Space needed for LVM Snapshot

June 9, 2008 By 5 Comments

We know MySQL Backups using LVM are pretty cool (check out mylvmbackup) or MMM though it is quite typical LVM is not configurable properly to be usable for MySQL Backups. Quite frequently I find LVM installed on the system but no free space left to be used as snapshot undo space, which means LVM is [...]

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How much overhead DRDB could cause ?

June 2, 2008 By 4 Comments

I was working with the customer today investigating MySQL over DRBD performance issues. His basic question was why there is so much overhead with DRBD in my case, while it is said there should be no more than 30% overhead when DRBD is used. The truth is – because how DRBD works it does not [...]

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