by Vadim Tkachenko | Mar 16, 2009 | Benchmarks, Insight for DBAs
Playing with last version of xtrabackup and compress it I noticed that gzip is unacceptable slow for both compression and decompression operations. Actually Peter wrote about it some time ago, but I wanted to review that data having some new information. In current...
by Peter Zaitsev | Mar 9, 2009 | Hardware and Storage
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...
by Vadim Tkachenko | Mar 2, 2009 | Hardware and Storage
We finally managed to get Intel X25-E SSD drive into our lab. I attached it to our Dell PowerEdge R900. The story making it running is worth separate mentioning – along with Intel X25-E I got HighPoint 2300 controller and CentOS 5.2 just could not start with two...
by Peter Zaitsev | Mar 2, 2009 | Insight for Developers
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...
by Peter Zaitsev | Mar 1, 2009 | Insight for DBAs
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...
by Vadim Tkachenko | Feb 24, 2009 | Percona Software
For long time as main backup solution for MySQL on Linux we have been using LVM snapshots. Performance concerns from performance critical envinronment caused us to do LVM performance research which showed horrible results forcing us to look at more performing...
by Peter Zaitsev | Feb 7, 2009 | Insight for DBAs
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...
by Peter Zaitsev | Jan 12, 2009 | Insight for DBAs
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...
by Evgeniy Stepchenko | Dec 29, 2008 | Percona Software
Today we announce release 1.0.2-2 of our XtraDB storage engine. Here is a list of enhancements: split-buffer_pool_mutex The patch splits global InnoDB buffer_pool mutex into several and eliminates waitings on flush IO and mutex when there is no enough free buffers. It...
by Peter Zaitsev | Dec 22, 2008 | Insight for Developers
When your goal is to optimize application performance it is very important to understand what goal do you really have. If you do not have a good understanding of the goal your performance optimization effort may well still bring its results but you may waste a lot of...
by Peter Zaitsev | Dec 17, 2008 | Insight for DBAs
So lets say you have .frm file for the table and you need to recover CREATE TABLE statement for this table. In particular when we do Innodb Recovery we often get .frm files and some mess in the Innodb tablespace from which we have to get data from. Of course we could...
by Vadim Tkachenko | Dec 16, 2008 | Percona Software
Today we officially announce our new storage engine, “Percona XtraDB”, which is based on the InnoDB storage engine. It’s 100% backwards-compatible with standard InnoDB, so you can use it as a drop-in replacement in your current environment. It is...
by Peter Zaitsev | Dec 14, 2008 | Insight for DBAs
One command, which few people realize exists is SHOW OPEN TABLES – it allows you to examine what tables do you have open right now: mysql> show open tables from test; +----------+-------+--------+-------------+ | Database | Table | In_use | Name_locked |...
by Vadim Tkachenko | Dec 9, 2008 | Percona Events
Well, actually it is not reading future, but just mysql-5.1.30.rhel4.spec file from MySQL RedHat 4 SRPM. I found there few MySQL Enterprise Editions, namely: MySQL Enterprise Server – Advanced Edition MySQL Enterprise Server – Pro Edition MySQL Enterprise...
by Peter Zaitsev | Dec 5, 2008 | Hardware and Storage
One typical question which frequently pops up is whenever it is better to use hardware upgrade or optimize software more. I already wrote about it, for example here. Today I’ll look at the same topic from the consultants view. When consultant should suggest...
by Peter Zaitsev | Nov 28, 2008 | Insight for Developers
When doing performance analyzes you often would want to see 95 percentile, 99 percentile and similar values. The “average” is the evil of performance optimization and often as helpful as “average patient temperature in the hospital”. Lets set...
by Peter Zaitsev | Nov 28, 2008 | Percona Software
Working with number of hosting providers I always wonder how do they manage to keep things up given MySQL gives you so little ways to really restrict how much resources single user can consume. I have written over a year ago about 10+ ways to crash or overload MySQL...
by Peter Zaitsev | Nov 26, 2008 | Insight for DBAs
I have written before – MyISAM Does Not Scale, or it does quite well – two main things stopping you is table locks and global mutex on the KeyCache. Table Locks are not the issue for Read Only workload and write intensive workloads can be dealt with by...
by Peter Zaitsev | Nov 24, 2008 | Insight for DBAs
INFORMATION_SCHEMA, in particular by favorite TABLES table is not only helpful to understand tables you have on the system, but I have also found it to be very helpful as a scripting language for variety of database administration tasks. It can be more straightforward...
by Peter Zaitsev | Nov 8, 2008 | Insight for Developers
I had an interesting tuning case few days ago. The system serving high traffic using Innodb tables would be stalling every so often causing even very simple queries both reads and writes taking long time to complete, with progress almost paused (dropping from...
