May 20, 2013

Win a free ticket to RailsConf!

I have one free ticket to give away to RailsConf next week in Baltimore! Post a comment to win, and if you aren’t the winner, I’ll give you a discount code for Percona Live as a consolation prize. Here’s the catch: you have to find at least one thing wrong with the following typical logrotate [...]

Shard-Query EC2 images available

Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]

How to Identify Bad Queries in MySQL

Finding bad queries is a big part of optimization. A scientific optimization process can be simplified to “can anything be improved for less than it costs not to improve it? – if not, we’re done.” In databases, we care most about the work the database is doing. That is, queries. There are other things we [...]

Estimating Replication Capacity

It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to optimize your system when your replication runs [...]

Data mart or data warehouse?

This is part two in my six part series on business intelligence, with a focus on OLAP analysis. Part 1 – Intro to OLAP Identifying the differences between a data warehouse and a data mart. (this post) Introduction to MDX and the kind of SQL which a ROLAP tool must generate to answer those queries. [...]

On Good Instrumentation

In so many cases troubleshooting applications I keep thinking how much more efficient things could be going if only there would be a good instrumentation available. Most of applications out there have very little code to help understand what is going on and if it is there it is frequently looking at some metrics which [...]

Two Types of MySQL Users

In comments to my previous post I got number number of comments saying if MySQL would not have multiple storage engine interface it would not allow people to do various very cool stuff. And I agree with this. The question is how cool you want your database operation to be ? Visiting customers I see [...]

Debugging problems with row based replication

MySQL 5.1 introduces row based binary logging. In fact, the default binary logging format in GA versions of MySQL 5.1 is ‘MIXED’ STATEMENT*;   The binlog_format  variable can still be changed per sessions which means it is possible that some of your binary log entries will be written in a row-based fashion instead of the [...]

Tokyo Tyrant – The Extras Part I : Is it Durable?

You know how in addition to the main movie you have extras on the DVD.  Extra commentary, bloopers, extra scenes, etc? Well welcome the Tyrant extras.  With my previous blog posts I was trying to set-up a case for looking at NOSQL tools, and not meant to be a decision making tool.  Each solution has [...]

Call for opinions: Do we need MySQL 5.0 with MySQL 5.4 performance

MySQL 5.4 comes with Innodb engine which seems to have much better performance than MySQL 5.0 – this is due to locking and IO patches from Google integrated in this release (which are similar to appropriate Percona patches) as well as some unique fixes such as different innodb_thread_concurrency handling and other optimization. Should we take [...]