by Pablo Svampa | Apr 30, 2025 | Benchmarks, Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, PostgreSQL
Indexing is one of PostgreSQL’s most effective tools for improving query performance, but like any powerful tool, it can cause real problems when overused. A while ago, my colleague Jobin wrote a blog post exploring the negative side effects of over-indexing in...
by Sveta Smirnova | Jun 26, 2018 | Insight for DBAs, Insight for Developers, MariaDB, MySQL, Percona Software, Webinars
Please join Percona’s Principal Support Escalation Specialist Sveta Smirnova as she presents Troubleshooting Best Practices: Monitoring the Production Database Without Killing Performance on Wednesday, June 27th at 11:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 2:00 PM EDT (UTC-4). Register...
by Dave Avery | Jun 20, 2017 | Insight for DBAs, MySQL, Webinars
Join Percona’s Senior Operations Engineer, Daniel Kowalewski as he presents Deploying MySQL in Production on Thursday, June 22, 2017 at 11:00 am PDT / 2:00 pm EDT (UTC-7). Register Now MySQL is famous for being something you can install and get going in less than...
by Michael Coburn | Jul 2, 2014 | Cloud, Insight for DBAs, MySQL
I recently had an opportunity to migrate a customer from a physical server into Amazon’s RDS environment. In this particular case the customers’ platform makes extensive use of MySQL triggers and views. I came across two significant issues that prevented...
by Aurimas Mikalauskas | Sep 5, 2013 | MySQL
MySQL 5.6 has a great many new features, including, but certainly not limited to a number of performance improvements. However, besides the widely talked-about features such as InnoDB support for full text search, optimizer, performance schema improvements and GTID,...
by Peter Zaitsev | Dec 11, 2010 | Insight for DBAs, MySQL
I wanted for a while to write about using MySQL Partitioning for Performance Optimization and I just got a relevant customer case to illustrate it. First, you need to understand how partitions work internally. Partitions are on the low level are separate table. This...
by Peter Zaitsev | Dec 9, 2010 | Insight for DBAs, MySQL
Understanding how well your tables and indexes fit to buffer pool are often very helpful to understand why some queries are IO bound and others not – it may be because the tables and indexes they are accessing are not in cache, for example being washed away by...
by Peter Zaitsev | Dec 9, 2010 | Insight for DBAs, MySQL
Innodb/XtraDB tables do benefit from being reorganized often. You can get data physically laid out in primary key order as well as get a better feel for the primary key and index pages, and so use less space, it’s just that MySQL OPTIMIZE TABLE might not be the...
by Peter Zaitsev | Dec 8, 2010 | Insight for DBAs, MySQL
One data point which is very helpful but surprisingly few people have is the history of the table sizes. Projection of data growth is very important component for capacity planning and simply watching the growth of space used on partition is not very helpful. Now as...
by Peter Zaitsev | Oct 15, 2010 | Insight for DBAs, MySQL
Some Applications need to store some transient data which is frequently regenerated and MEMORY table look like a very good match for this sort of tasks. Unfortunately this will bite when you will be looking to add Replication to your environment as MEMORY tables do...
by Peter Zaitsev | Oct 8, 2010 | Insight for DBAs, MySQL
I recently worked on upgrading MySQL from one of very early MySQL 5.0 versions to Percona Server 5.1. This was a classical upgrade scenario which can cause surprises. Master and few slaves need to be upgraded. It is a shared database used by tons of applications...
by Peter Zaitsev | Sep 10, 2010 | Insight for Developers, MySQL
I worked on the problem recently which showed itself as rather low MySQL load (probably 5% CPU usage and close to zero IO) would spike to have hundreds instances of threads running at the same time, causing intense utilization spike and server very unresponsive for...
by Peter Zaitsev | Jul 20, 2010 | Insight for DBAs, MySQL
It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to...
by Peter Zaitsev | Jul 13, 2010 | Insight for Developers, MySQL
So lets imagine you have the server handling 100.000 user accounts. You can see the CPU,IO and Network usage is below 10% of capacity – does it mean you can count on server being able to handle 1.000.000 of accounts ? Not really, and there are few reasons why,...
by Peter Zaitsev | Jun 2, 2010 | Insight for Developers, MySQL
When analyzing how good or bad response time is it is not handy to look at the averages, min or max times – something what is easily computed using built in aggregate functions. We most likely would like to see some percentile numbers – 95 percentile or 99...
by Peter Zaitsev | May 31, 2010 | Insight for Developers, MySQL
In so many cases troubleshooting applications I keep thinking how much more efficient things could be going if only there would be a good instrumentation available. Most of applications out there have very little code to help understand what is going on and if it is...
by Vadim Tkachenko | Apr 8, 2010 | Hardware and Storage, MySQL
While a scale-out solution has traditionally been popular for MySQL, it’s interesting to see what room we now have to scale up – cheap memory, fast storage, better power efficiency. There certainly are a lot of options now – I’ve been meeting...
by Peter Zaitsev | Feb 15, 2010 | Insight for DBAs, MySQL
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...
by Peter Zaitsev | Jan 18, 2010 | Insight for DBAs, MySQL
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...
by Vadim Tkachenko | May 7, 2009 | Percona Software
It is obvious thing for me, but I just figured out it may be not common understanding. Xtrabackup is also can be used (not only can, but we actually use it this way) to clone one slave to another, or just setup new slave from the master. And it is done in almost...
