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 [...]
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 [...]
Percona Server Scales Vertically with Virident tachIOn Drives
February 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
We’ve published a new white paper that explains how to stop sharding and start scaling vertically with PCI-E flash drives, specifically the Virident tachIOn drive, which offers consistent, low-latency IO performance. I’ve been beating this drum for a while, so it’s a great feeling to have an explicitly recommended reference architecture: buy flash storage first, [...]
White Paper: Preventing MySQL Emergencies
February 7, 2011 By 7 Comments
About a year ago, I started a study of emergency incidents that our customers filed with us. What I found was really surprising, and defied conventional wisdom. I learned a lot about preventing emergencies. I just published the outcome as a white paper, including checklists that you can use and modify for your own servers. [...]
Percona Server Fast-Restart White Paper Posted
January 10, 2011 By 2 Comments
I’ve posted a new white paper about the implementation and benefits of Percona Server’s fast-restart capabilities. Briefly, after shutting down and restarting or rebooting the server, it can be back to full performance in a couple of minutes. That’s minutes, not hours or days. This matters a lot for keeping uptime high and reducing hardware [...]
Percona white paper: Forecasting MySQL Scalability
November 16, 2010 By 6 Comments
Ewen and I have just published Percona’s latest white paper, Forecasting MySQL Scalability with the Universal Scalability Law. This is essentially a streamlined walk-through of Dr. Neil J. Gunther’s book Guerrilla Capacity Planning, with examples to show how you can apply it to MySQL servers. One thing alluded to in the paper is extracting the [...]
Implementing Parallel Replication in MySQL
November 8, 2010 By 3 Comments
Based on discussions with several clients, we are strongly considering implementing a limited form of parallel replication. Single-threaded replication is one of the most severe limitations in the MySQL server. We have a brief outline of the ideas at this wiki blueprint. So far, the “binlog order” idea is the only one that is workable. [...]
Percona White Paper: Architecting SaaS Applications with XtraDB
October 11, 2010 By 3 Comments
Vadim and I have just published a new technical white paper. It shows how Percona Server with XtraDB can make large-scale multi-tenant databases easier to build with MySQL. Our experiences working with SaaS and shared-hosting companies influenced the features we included in Percona Server and XtraDB, and I think this is the best explanation of [...]
Why message queues and offline processing are so important
August 10, 2010 By 3 Comments
If you read Percona’s whitepaper on Goal-Driven Performance Optimization, you will notice that we define performance using the combination of three separate terms. You really want to read the paper, but let me summarize it here: Response Time – This is the time required to complete a desired task. Throughput – Throughput is measured in [...]
Goal-Driven Performance Optimization white-paper available
May 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment
If you were at last month’s MySQL conference, you might have seen a small flyer we were distributing, titled “A brief introduction to Goal-Driven Performance Optimization.” This is a super-compressed technical introduction to one of the methods we use to solve problems as quickly and efficiently as possible. We’ve just posted this on a new [...]
