Jan 26, 2011 |
Hardware and Storage, MySQL
Mat Keep’s blog post on InnoDB-vs-MyISAM benchmarks that Oracle recently published prompted me to do some mathematical modeling of InnoDB’s scalability as the number of cores in the server increases. Vadim runs lots of benchmarks that measure what happens under increasing concurrency while holding the hardware constant, but not as many with varying numbers of […]
Jan 16, 2011 |
Percona Events
After more than four years of using a theme that can charitably be described as rustic, we’ve updated our look. We’re using the News theme from StudioPress, which is a bargain; their themes and theme framework are an engineering marvel. We’re still using the amazing Sphinx search plugin from Ivinco for fast and relevant searches. […]
Jan 10, 2011 |
Insight for Developers, 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 […]
Jan 10, 2011 |
MySQL, Percona Software
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 […]
Jan 08, 2011 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and […]
Dec 09, 2010 |
MySQL, Percona Software
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.
Dec 07, 2010 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
I usually tell people to use official MySQL builds from MySQL, or from their operating system distribution if they don’t want to do that. (This assumes that there is no compelling reason to use third-party builds such as Percona’s.) Sometimes, though, people want to create their own builds, or use a build that is “optimized” […]
Nov 16, 2010 |
MySQL, Percona Events
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 […]
Nov 16, 2010 |
Hardware and Storage, MySQL
Last night a customer had an emergency in selected machines on a large cluster of quite uniform database servers. Some of the servers were slowing down in a very puzzling way over a short time span (a couple of hours). Queries were taking multiple seconds to execute instead of being practically instantaneous. But nothing seemed […]
Nov 11, 2010 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
The new release of Maatkit has a useful feature in mk-index-usage to help you determine how indexes are used in more flexible ways. The default report just prints out ALTER statements for removing unused indexes, which is nice, but it’s often helpful to ask more sophisticated questions about index usage. I’ll use this blog’s queries […]
Nov 08, 2010 |
Insight for DBAs, MySQL
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. […]
Nov 08, 2010 |
MySQL, Percona Events
Register now for a free Percona webinar about migrating your MyISAM databases to InnoDB. Save the date: Dec 1, 2010 at 9:00 AM PST (California) time. Update: the date was originally listed as December 2nd, but that was a mistake. It’s December 1st. We know that not everyone can attend expensive conferences that require travel. […]
Nov 05, 2010 |
MySQL, Percona Events
You probably saw the Twitter storm over Oracle’s pricing changes and InnoDB in the last few days. The fear about Oracle removing InnoDB from the free version of MySQL was baseless — it was just a misunderstanding. Still, in the years since MySQL has been acquired by Sun, and then by Oracle, many MySQL users […]
Nov 01, 2010 |
MySQL, Percona Events
There’s an interview with Baron Schwartz (that’s me) on WebPulp.tv. Topics include the history of Percona’s software such as Percona Server (our version of the MySQL database server) and XtraBackup, what we do at Percona, what tools we use to do it, how to think logically about performance optimization, what ugly surprises happen when you […]
Oct 27, 2010 |
Insight for Developers, MySQL
This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in core use cases (links: part 1, 2, 3). This post is about the way MySQL handles connections, allocating one thread per connection to the server. MySQL Limitations: Connections MySQL is a single process with multiple threads. Not all databases are architected this […]
Oct 25, 2010 |
Insight for Developers, MySQL
This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in certain circumstances (links: part 1, 2). This post is about subqueries, which in some cases execute outside-in instead of inside-out as users expect.
Oct 23, 2010 |
Insight for Developers, MySQL
This is the second in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in certain circumstances (links: part 1). In the first part, I wrote about single-threaded replication. Upstream from the replicas is the primary, which enables replication by writing a so-called “binary log” of events that modify data in the server. The binary log is […]
Oct 21, 2010 |
MySQL, Percona Events
We’ve published our first case study. The customer, ideeli, had a database that was struggling on standard MySQL and InnoDB. The big win was the upgrade to XtraDB. The business continued to grow quickly, and months later under much more traffic, the database is still outperforming their previous version. I thought I’d write a few […]
Oct 20, 2010 |
Percona Events
I’ve just added two categories to our forum, so you can post your job listings if you’re looking for someone to help you, and you can post your qualifications if you are available for hire.
Oct 20, 2010 |
Insight for Developers, MySQL
I recently mentioned a few of the big “non-starter” limitations Postgres has overcome for specific use cases. I decided to write a series of blog posts on MySQL’s unsolved severe limitations. I mean limitations that really hobble it for major, important needs — not in areas where it isn’t used, but in areas where it […]