Jan 13, 2009 |
Percona Events
As we’ve said before, the Percona team just keeps growing. This time around, I’m pleased to welcome Ryan and Vladimir.
Ryan Lowe initially joined us from Florida (USA) in June. In his …a consultant, DBA (with Oracle, too!), DBA manager, and programmer makes him a great match for Percona‘s clients. He also contributed some improvements to Wordpress, and he blogs here and on Pablowe.
…and Ryan, a big welcome — we are fortunate indeed you’re working with us. And… go team!
PS: I can’t help but triple-dip, and point out that our own Ewen Fortune has …
Jan 09, 2009 |
Percona Software
Percona has been building and contributing to open-source software since the company was founded, and individually we’ve been doing the same thing for many years. We think it’s a huge value for our customers and the community. We’re involved in a dozen or so open-source projects, but our three core efforts at the moment are […]
Dec 22, 2008 |
Insight for Developers
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is […]
Dec 04, 2008 |
Percona Events
Percona has a new Chief Operating Officer! It is Tom Basil, who was Employee #11 at MySQL and led the Support organization there for almost eight years. He was the founding Director of Support at MySQL, and built it into a team of about 60 people all across the world. Tom was legendary as a […]
Nov 26, 2008 |
Insight for Developers
There are all sorts of different interfaces to memcached, but you don’t need any of them to make requests from the command line, because its protocol is so simple. Try this, assuming it’s running on the usual port on the local machine:
Nov 24, 2008 |
Insight for Developers
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This […]
Nov 21, 2008 |
Insight for DBAs
Peter wrote a post a while ago about choosing a good InnoDB log file size. Not to pick on Peter, but the post actually kind of talks about a lot of things and then doesn’t tell you how to choose a good log file size! So I thought I’d clarify it a little. The basic […]
Oct 31, 2008 |
Benchmarks, Insight for DBAs
This is a fun question I’ve been wanting to test for some time. How much overhead does a trivial WHERE clause add to a MySQL query? To find out, I set my InnoDB buffer pool to 256MB and created a table that’s large enough to test, but small enough to fit wholly in memory:
Oct 13, 2008 |
Percona Software
Percona’s patches are now available to a wider audience via OurDelta, a community effort to provide builds with features (Percona patches, Google patches, etc) and storage engines (PBXT, Sphinx, etc) that aren’t in the main MySQL server. Arjen Lentz is really the brainchild behind this. Kudos Arjen! What does this mean for the Percona patches? […]
Oct 08, 2008 |
Insight for DBAs
The trouble with slave lag is that you often can’t see it coming. Especially if the slave’s load is pretty uniform, a slave that’s at 90% of its capacity to keep up with the master can be indistinguishable from one that’s at 5% of its capacity. So how can you tell when your slave is […]
Oct 01, 2008 |
Percona Events
Although we haven’t announced any new members in a while, the Percona team has continued to grow steadily behind the scenes. Our hiring policy is to have a few months’ provisional period to ensure the…, of course. Ewen has been a consultant and contractor before joining Percona, and has many years of experience in Oracle, MySQL, Unix systems ….
Piotr Biel lives in Poland, quite close to our other Polish team member (Maciek Dobrzanski). In his past as a system architect he … can do!
Ewen and Piotr, a very warm welcome to the Percona team from all of us, and we are so glad to …
Sep 24, 2008 |
Insight for Developers
A paginated display is one of the top optimization scenarios we see in the real world. Search results pages, leaderboards, and most-popular lists are good examples. You know the design pattern: display 20 results in some most-relevant order. Show a “next” and “previous” link. And usually, show how many items are in the whole list […]
Sep 20, 2008 |
Insight for Developers
When optimizing queries for customers, the first thing I do with a slow query is figure out what it’s trying to do. You can’t fully optimize a query unless you know how to consider alternative ways to write it, and you can’t do that unless you know what the query “means.” I frequently run into […]
Aug 23, 2008 |
Insight for DBAs
Yesterday I helped someone who was seeing a lot of “server has gone away” error messages on his website. While investigating this problem, I noticed several things amiss, which appeared to be related but really weren’t. The biggest measurable sign was
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[percona@server ~]$ mysqladmin ext | grep Abort | Aborted_clients | 14835 | | Aborted_connects | 15598 | |
Aug 18, 2008 |
Insight for DBAs
There are quite a few “tuning primers” and “my.cnf generators” and “sample my.cnf files” online. The ultimate tool for generating an optimal my.cnf is not a tool. It’s a human with many years of experience, deep knowledge of MySQL and the full application stack, and familiarity with your application and your data. I don’t know […]
Aug 04, 2008 |
Insight for Developers
We recently examined a customer’s system to try to speed up an ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) process for a big data set into a sort of datamart or DW. What we typically do is ask customers to run the process in question, and then examine what’s happening. In this case, the (very large, powerful) […]
Jul 30, 2008 |
Insight for DBAs
I use Maatkit for a lot of grunt work and thought you might appreciate this quick tip. Suppose you have a bazillion tables to convert from MyISAM to InnoDB, but they are mixed in with other tables that are already InnoDB, or are another storage engine that you don’t want to touch.
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mk-find <db_name> --engine MyISAM --exec "ALTER TABLE %D.%N ENGINE=INNODB" --print |
Here’s a […]
Jul 25, 2008 |
Insight for DBAs
This article is not meant to malign hosting providers, but I want to point out something you should be aware of if you’re getting someone else to build and host your servers for you. Most hosting providers — even the big names — continue to install 32-bit GNU/Linux operating systems on 64-bit hardware. This is […]
Jul 25, 2008 |
Percona Events
Daniel Nichter, the author of several very useful MySQL tools, has joined with Percona to continue to improve Maatkit — the “other” toolkit we rely on daily. Daniel is a skilled Perl programmer who understands MySQL. He is in a perfect position to move the project forward on a more regular basis than I’ve been […]
Jul 13, 2008 |
Percona Events
I just posted slides from a talk I gave at a Facebook application developer conference in Las Vegas this weekend. The talk is titled Outrun the Lions. Our customers run several of the top 10 applications on Facebook right now (as measured by the number of active users), and I revealed the secrets to building […]
