May 19, 2013

linux.conf.au 2012 roundup

I spent last week at linux.conf.au in Ballarat, Victoria (that’s the Victoria in Australia, not wherever else there may be one) which is only a pleasant two hour drive from my home town of Melbourne (Australia, not Florida). I sent an email internally to our experts detailing bits of the conference that may interest them [...]

Setting up XFS on Hardware RAID — the simple edition

There are about a gazillion FAQs and HOWTOs out there that talk about XFS configuration, RAID IO alignment, and mount point options.  I wanted to try to put some of that information together in a condensed and simplified format that will work for the majority of use cases.  This is not meant to cover every [...]

Make your file system error resilient

One of the typical problems I see setting up ext2/3/4 file system is sticking to defaults when it comes to behavior on errors. By default these filesystems are configured to Continue when error (such as IO error or meta data inconsistency) is discovered which can continue spreading corruption. This manifests itself in a worst way [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks

In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Theory

Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at [...]

Using XtraBackup on NFS for MySQL backups

XtraBackup works great for backing MySQL up to an NFS volume, but there is a gotcha that you need to be aware of. This applies to anything you do with NFS, not just XtraBackup. The gotcha is that NFS uses client-side caching to reduce overhead of sending data across the network.

Webinar: Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup

We’ve had such a large number of signups to our Migrating MyISAM to InnoDB webinar, that we decided to hold one more before the year is out: December, 8th 9AM PST: Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup.

Lost innodb tables, xfs and binary grep

Before I start a story about the data recovery case I worked on yesterday, here’s a quick tip – having a database backup does not mean you can restore from it. Always verify your backup can be used to restore the database! If not automatically, do this manually, at least once a month. No, seriously [...]

Virident tachIOn: New player on Flash PCI-E cards market

(Note: The review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) In my talk on MySQL Conference and Expo 2010 “An Overview of Flash Storage for Databases” I mentioned that most likely there are other players coming soon. I actually was not aware about any real [...]

FlashCache: more benchmarks

Previously I covered simple case with FlashCache, when data fits into cache partitions, now I am trying to test when data is bigger than cache. But before test setup let me address some concern (which I also had). Intel X25-M has a write cache which is not battery backuped, so there is suspect you may [...]