If you are planning to upgrade or make any configuration change on your MySQL database the first advice usually is: – Benchmark! How should we do that benchmark? People usually run generic benchmark tools like sysbench, tpcc or mysqlslap that are good to know the number of transactions per seconds that a database can do [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Failure Scenarios with only 2 nodes
July 25, 2012 By 6 Comments
During the design period of a new cluster, it is always advised to have at least 3 nodes (this is the case with PXC but it’s also the same with PRM). But why and what are the risks ? The goal of having more than 2 nodes, in fact an odd number is recommended in [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio
February 28, 2010 By 28 Comments
I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]
Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge
September 19, 2009 By 31 Comments
The mistake I commonly see among MySQL users is how indexes are created. Quite commonly people just index individual columns as they are referenced in where clause thinking this is the optimal indexing strategy. For example if I would have something like AGE=18 AND STATE=’CA’ they would create 2 separate indexes on AGE and STATE [...]
Give me 8 hours, and I’ll help you build a better application
August 29, 2009 By 4 Comments
I have run into a number of cases recently that all had a similar look and feel. In most of these cases, the symptoms were very complicated, but they boiled down to just a few problems that can be prevented in very simple ways. If you are not doing any of the following three simple [...]
Why MySQL’s binlog-do-db option is dangerous
May 14, 2009 By 15 Comments
I see a lot of people filtering replication with binlog-do-db, binlog-ignore-db, replicate-do-db, and replicate-ignore-db. Although there are uses for these, they are dangerous and in my opinion, they are overused. For many cases, there’s a safer alternative.
Converting Character Sets
March 17, 2009 By 21 Comments
The web is going the way of utf8. Drizzle has chosen it as the default character set, most back-ends to websites use it to store text data, and those who are still using latin1 have begun to migrate their databases to utf8. Googling for “mysql convert charset to utf8″ results in a plethora of sites, [...]
How much space does empty Innodb table take ?
December 16, 2008 By 7 Comments
How much space would empty MyISAM table take ? Probably 8K for .frm file, 1KB for .MYI file and 0 for MYD file. .MYI file can be larger if you have many indexes. How much space will Innodb take:
