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Peter Zaitsev
Peter managed the High Performance Group within MySQL until 2006, when he founded Percona. Peter has a Master's Degree in Computer Science and is an expert in database kernels, computer hardware, and application scaling.

Missleading Innodb message on recovery

As I wrote about 2 years ago the feature of Innodb to store copy of master’s position in Slave’s Innodb tablespace got broken. There is a lot of discussions at the corresponding bug report while outcome of the fix remained uncertain for me (the bug is market duplicate while the bugs it seems to be […]

Blob Storage in Innodb

I’m running in this misconception second time in a week or so, so it is time to blog about it. How blobs are stored in Innodb ? This depends on 3 factors. Blob size; Full row size and Innodb row format. But before we look into how BLOBs are really stored lets see what misconception […]

Why Swapping is bad for MySQL Performance ?

So you get MySQL or other applications using too much memory on the box or OS behaving funny and using more memory for cache and pushing application to the swap. This causes swapping and causes performance problems. This much is obvious. But how bad is it ? Should you count it same as normal Disk […]

How expensive is MySQL Replication for the Master

I generally thought about MySQL replication as being quite low overhead on Master, depending on number of Slaves. What kind of load extra Slave causes ? Well it just gets a copy of binary log streamed to it. All slaves typically get few last events in binary log so it is in cash. In most […]

Active Cache for MySQL

One of the problems I have with Memcache is this cache is passive, this means it only stores cached data. This means application using Memcache has to has to special logic to handle misses from the cache, being careful updating the cache – you may have multiple data modifications happening at the same time. Finally […]

What do we optimize with mk-query-digest ?

When we’re looking at mk-query-digest report we typically look at the Queries causing the most impact (sum of the query execution times) as well as queries having some longest samples. Why are we looking at these ? Queries with highest Impact are important because looking at these queries and optimizing them typically helps to improve […]

Battle around MySQL heats up

As the deadline for EC to decide if Oracle can acquire Sun and hence MySQL is coming up the tensions seems to heat up. Monty posts his open letter calling for help lobbying EC to stop Oracle from buying MySQL .

How many partitions can you have ?

I had an interesting case recently. The customer dealing with large MySQL data warehouse had the table which was had data merged into it with INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements. The performance was extremely slow. I turned out it is caused by hundreds of daily partitions created for this table. What is the most […]

Sphinx 0.9.9 is finally here.

Sphinx 0.9.9 is finally released to General Availability. The previous version 0.9.9-rc2 was released back in April so there was quite a gap. This release fixes about 40 bugs which are mostly rare or insignificant. Fixing bugs in 0.9.9 was smaller portion of work done in Sphinx during last half a year – 0.9.9-rc2 was […]

Great work Innodb Team

I thought I should praise Innodb team for all the work they have been doing recently. We see a lot of cool stuff happening, especially in the area of our interest which is Performance And Scalability. Innodb Plugin 1.0.4 had a lot of great performance improvements and 1.0.5/1.0.6 gets even further with long standing caching […]

More on table_cache

In my previous post I looked into how large table_cache actually can decrease performance. The “miss” path is getting more expensive very quickly as table cache growths so if you’re going to have high miss ratio anyway you’re better off with small table cache. What I have not checked though is how does table_cache (or […]

MySQL Performance Blog was down today

MySQL Performance Blog (and percona.com too) were down today because the switch in our rack died completely. It took a while to fix it using secondary switch we had. Provider was not willing to do it as remote hands so I had to drive to the data center to fix it. We got number of […]

Rare evil MySQL Bug

There is the rare bug which I ran into every so often. Last time I’ve seen it about 3 years ago on MySQL 4.1 and I hoped it is long fixed since… but it looks like it is not. I now get to see MySQL 5.4.2 in the funny state. When you see bug happening […]

How innodb_open_files affects performance

Recently I looked at table_cache sizing which showed larger table cache does not always provides the best performance. So I decided to look at yet another similar variable – innodb_open_files which defines how many files Innodb will keep open while working in innodb_file_per_table mode. Unlike MyISAM Innodb does not have to keep open file descriptor […]

table_cache negative scalability

Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL […]

New MariaDB release is out

MariaDB project kept development going in the repository only not providing any binary releases since April, so release was well over due and it is here now. If you’re wondering how this release of MariaDB is different from MySQL you should read this FAQ

Giving a talk in Palo Alto, November 3rd

I’m going to give a talk on Goal Driven Performance Optimization next Tuesday. This is one of my favorite talks as it goes beyond MySQL to the principles you can apply to performance optimizations of the complex systems, especially when you have to do a lot in limited time or budget and so you can’t […]

Watch out for your CRON jobs

Resolving extreme database overload for the customer recently I have found about 80 copies of same cron job running hammering the database. This number is rather extreme typically the affect is noticed and fixed well before that but the problem with run away cron jobs is way to frequent. If slow down happens on the […]

Guidance for MySQL Optimizer Developers

I spend large portion of my life working on MySQL Performance Optimization and so MySQL Optimizer is quite important to me. For probably last 10 years I chased first Monty and later Igor with Optimizer complains and suggestions. Here are some general ideas which I think can help to make optimizer in MySQL, MariaDB or […]