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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.

MySQL Pays attention to Bugs (Finally!)

I should say I can see results of new engineering/refactoring/bug hunt efforts inside Sun/MySQL. Over last couple of weeks I started getting a lot of messages from the bugs system about bugs I reported long ago which were deferred to be fixed later or were left in open state. Here is example of such a […]

MySQL Meetups Sponsorship Available

As you know Sun/MySQL and MeetUp.com could not agree on terms of the sponsorship and so now all MySQL meetup organizers have to pay for their Meetups or move them to the different location. Facebook is suggested as one of alternatives. I’m not to take any sides in this story and judge who is wrong […]

Getting annoyed with MyISAM multiple key caches.

As I’ve wrote few times using multiple key caches is a great way to get CPU scalability if you’re using MyISAM. It is however very annoying – this feature really looks half baked to me. The problem with multiple key caches and mapping of tables to the different files is – there is no way […]

Call for opinions: Do we need MySQL 5.0 with MySQL 5.4 performance

MySQL 5.4 comes with Innodb engine which seems to have much better performance than MySQL 5.0 – this is due to locking and IO patches from Google integrated in this release (which are similar to appropriate Percona patches) as well as some unique fixes such as different innodb_thread_concurrency handling and other optimization. Should we take […]

Talking MySQL to Sphinx

In the recently released Sphinx version 0.9.9-rc2 there is a support for MySQL wire protocol and SphinxQL – SQL-like language to query Sphinx indexes. This support is currently in its early preview stage but it is still fun to play with. A thing to mention – unlike MySQL Storage Engines, some of which as InfoBright […]

Adjusting Innodb for Memory resident workload

As larger and larger amount of memory become common (512GB is something you can fit into relatively commodity server this day) many customers select to build their application so all or most of their database (frequently Innodb) fits into memory. If all tables fit in Innodb buffer pool the performance for reads will be quite […]

Sphinx Technologies launches Sphinx Support

A couple of weeks ago Sphinx Technologies, a company behind Sphinx Full Text Search Engine launched Sphinx Support Packages which I think is a great value for everyone using Sphinx in Production. This is also a great way to support the project and get something in return – even if you’re not actively using support […]

PROCEDURE ANALYSE

Quite common task during schema review is to find the optimal data type for the column value – for example column is defined as INT but is it really needed or may be SMALLINT or even TINYINT will do instead. Does it contain any NULLs or it can be defined NOT NULL which reduces space […]

Another ingenious piece of Sun Marketing

So a while ago I wrote about fun post about MySQL Scalability to 256 way…. Besides discussion on the thread itself I had a lot of private comments in my mail from Sun/MySQL employees which tended to agree with me on this being the a large stretch.

When would you use SAN with MySQL ?

One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?

Understanding Performance Optimization Terminology

There are few terms you need to have a good understanding if you’re working with high volume systems. I commonly see these mixed and people not understanding the difference between them. Performance – The performance comes down to performing up to users expectations (or expectations of your boss) which drills down to two important metrics […]

KISS KISS KISS

When I visit customers quite often they tell me about number of creative techniques they heard on the conferences, read on the blogs, forums and Internet articles and they ask me if they should use them. My advice is frequently – do not. It is fun to be creative but creative solutions also means unproven […]

Beware of MySQL Data Truncation

Here is nice gotcha which I’ve seen many times and which can cause just a minefield for many reasons. Lets say you had a system storing articles and you use article_id as unsigned int. As the time goes and you see you may get over 4 billions of articles you change the type for article_id […]

Disaster: LVM Performance in Snapshot Mode

In many cases I speculate how things should work based on what they do and in number of cases this lead me forming too good impression about technology and when running in completely unanticipated bug or performance bottleneck. This is exactly the case with LVM Number of customers have reported the LVM gives very high […]

Funniest bug ever

Recently my attention was brought to this bug which is a nightmare bug for any consultant. Working with production systems we assume reads are reads and if we’re just reading we can’t break anything. OK may be we can crash the server with some select query which runs into some bug but not cause the […]

Beware: ext3 and sync-binlog do not play well together

One of our customers reported strange problem with MySQL having extremely poor performance when sync-binlog=1 is enabled, even though the system with RAID and BBU were expected to have much better performance. The problem could be repeated with SysBench as follows:

Dropping unused indexes

Vadim wrote some time ago about how to find unused indexes with single query. I was working on the system today and found hundreds of unused indexes on dozens of tables so just dropping indexes manually did not look fun. So I extended Vadim’s query to generate ALTER TABLE statements automatically. I also made it […]

Some little known facts about Innodb Insert Buffer

Despite being standard Innodb feature forever Insert Buffers remains some kind of mysterious thing for a lot of people, so let me try to explain thing a little bit. Innodb uses insert buffer to “cheat” and not to update index leaf pages when at once but “buffer” such updates so several updates to the same […]

Should you move from MyISAM to Innodb ?

There is significant portion of customers which are still using MyISAM when they come to us, so one of the big questions is when it is feasible to move to Innodb and when staying on MyISAM is preferred ? I generally prefer to see Innodb as the main storage engine because it makes life much […]