Percona reaches 1000-customer milestone
Customer 1000 has signed on with Percona (press release). Many thanks to all of our customers!
Baron SchwartzBaron is the lead author of High Performance MySQL. He is a former Percona employee.
Percona Server and XtraBackup weekly news, March 5th
What’s new this week in Percona Server:
How Percona diagnoses MySQL server stalls
We receive many requests for help with server stalls. They come under various names: lockup, freeze, sudden slowdown. When something happens only once or twice a day, it can be difficult to catch it in action. Unfortunately, this often leads to trial-and-error approaches, which can drag on for days (or even months), and cause a […]
What is innodb_support_xa?
A common misunderstanding about innodb_support_xa is that it enables user-initiated XA transactions, that is, transactions that are prepared and then committed on multiple systems, with an external transaction coordinator. This is actually not precisely what this option is for. It enables two-phase commit in InnoDB (prepare, then commit). This is necessary not only for user-initiated […]
Is VoltDB really as scalable as they claim?
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
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, […]
Percona Server and XtraBackup weekly news, February 26th
Percona Server has a new logo:
Friends of Percona Get 20% Off at the MySQL Conference!
We have a special Friends of Percona discount code that you can use to get 20% off of registration at the MySQL conference in April: mys11pkb. If you click the image to the left, or this special link, it will pre-fill the code for you when you check out. Read on to see the list […]
Death match! EBS versus SSD price, performance, and QoS
Is it a good idea to deploy your database into the cloud? It depends. I have seen it work well many times, and cause trouble at other times. In this blog post I want to examine cloud-based I/O. I/O matters a lot when a) the database’s working set is bigger than the server’s memory, or […]
Percona Server and XtraBackup weekly news, February 19th
This week’s announcement is short: last week was pretty much all-hands-on-deck for our first 5.5.8 release. Still, it wasn’t ALL about the new release: The beta release of Percona Server 5.5.8 is out! More details in the release notes. There are ongoing discussions about parallel replication, as well as customer requests for enhancements to row-based […]
How to syntax-check your my.cnf file
For a long time, I’ve used a little trick to check whether there are syntax errors in a server’s my.cnf file. I do this when I need to shut down and restart the server, and I’ve either made changes to the file, or I’m worried that someone else has done so. I don’t want to […]
3 Common Rails + MySQL Mistakes
This is a cross-posting of an article we wrote for Engine Yard: Rails makes database interaction so simple that it’s easy to forget that the database isn’t always happy with what Rails does to it. Here are three leading mistakes that hurt many Rails applications. » Read the rest at Engine Yard’s blog. While you’re […]
Basic performance and diagnostic tools on Solaris
Much has been written about tools to inspect Linux systems, and much has been written about Solaris’s Big Important Tools such as DTrace. But I don’t recall seeing much in the MySQL blogs about basic tools to find one’s way around a Solaris system and discover the system, get fundamental performance, configuration, and status information, […]
Percona Server and XtraBackup weekly news, February 12th
Here’s the second installment of the weekly Percona Server news roundup. There’s no team or personnel-related news, so let’s dive right in.
White Paper: Preventing MySQL Emergencies
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 and XtraBackup weekly news, February 5th
I decided to try a series of blog posts keeping people informed about what’s happening in Percona Server and Percona XtraBackup once a week. I’ll try to digest things, but it turns out to be hard — I want to provide details and links for everything, but then it isn’t really a digest anymore, so […]
Fixing MySQL with a comment in the config file
A customer called with an emergency issue: A server that normally runs many MySQL instances wouldn’t start them up. Not only would it not start all of them, it wouldn’t even start the first one. The multiple instances were started through the mysql_multi init script. Perhaps you already know what was wrong!
Logging MySQL queries from the client instead of the server
The “slow query log” is the single most valuable way to examine query execution on your MySQL server. Queries are logged with timing information, and in the case of Percona Server, a great deal of additional performance and other diagnostic information. But the execution time recorded in the log is the time the query took […]
Sample Datasets for Benchmarking and Testing
Sometimes you just need some data to test and stress things. But randomly generated data is awful — it doesn’t have realistic distributions, and it isn’t easy to understand whether your results are meaningful and correct. Real or quasi-real data is best. Whether you’re looking for a couple of megabytes or many terabytes, the following […]
What is exec_time in binary logs?
If you’ve used MySQL’s mysqlbinlog tool, you’ve probably seen something like the following in the output: “exec_time=0” What is the exec_time? It seems to be the query’s execution time, but it is not.