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 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 [...]
Benchmarking Percona Server TokuDB vs InnoDB
After compiling Percona Server with TokuDB, of course I wanted to compare InnoDB performance vs TokuDB. I have a particular workload I’m interested in testing – it is an insert-intensive workload (which is TokuDB’s strong suit) with some roll-up aggregation, which should produce updates in-place (I will use INSERT .. ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements [...]
Follow these basics when migrating to Percona XtraDB Cluster for MySQL
Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL is a hot thing right now and some users jump right in without enough testing. Consequently, they’re more likely to either suffer failure or issues that prevent them from moving forward. If you are thinking of migrating your workload to Percona XtraDB Cluster, make sure to go through these [...]
10 years of MySQL User Conferences
In preparing for this month’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo, I’ve been reminiscing about the annual MySQL User Conference’s history – the 9 times it previously took place in its various reincarnations – and there are a lot of good things, fun things to remember. 2003 was the year that marked the first MySQL user conference [...]
MySQL 5.6 Compatible Percona Toolkit 2.2 Released
A new Percona Toolkit series has been released: Percona Toolkit 2.2 for MySQL 5.6. Several months in the making and many new features, changes, and improvements make this a great new series. It replaces the 2.1 series for which we plan to do only one more bug fix release (as 2.1.10) then retire. 2.2 is [...]
SimCity outages, traffic control and Thread Pool for MySQL
For this post I’m going to shamelessly exploit the litany of technical problems SimCity players encountered earlier this month and a few examples of how Thread Pool for MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL can help to prevent such incidents. Users of SimCity, a city-building and urban planning simulation video game, encountered network outages, issues with [...]
MySQL 5.6.10 Optimizer Limitations: Index Condition Pushdown
While preparing the webinar I will deliver this Friday, I ran into a quite interesting (although not very impacting) optimizer issue: a “SELECT *” taking half the time to execute than the same “SELECT one_indexed_column” query in MySQL 5.6.10. This turned into a really nice exercise for checking the performance and inner workings of one [...]
MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark
So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload. I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins. I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table. The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]
Join me for ‘MySQL 5.6: Advantages in a Nutshell.’ Webinar. March 6 at 10 a.m. PST
This Wednesday (March 6 at 10 a.m. PST) I’ll be presenting a webinar titled “MySQL 5.6: Advantages in a Nutshell.” In this presentation, I will provide a brief overview of the advantages MySQL 5.6 offers. My focus is a practical one – to identify the conditions in which one or another feature can be successfully [...]

