MySQL Performance Blog

July 31st 2006 was my last day working for MySQL and August 1st I started what later was incorporated Percona with Vadim joining me September 1st as co-founder.

Two years is a significant anniversary for any startup - surviving (and being profitable) for 2 years can be seen as validation of our business model and strategy and we’re quite happy about this.

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.

1. mk-find <db_name> --engine MyISAM --exec "ALTER TABLE %D.%N ENGINE=INNODB" --print

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 a serious mistake.

As there were many requests for Debian binary packages in our announcement of MySQL releases with custom patchsets, we decided to play with it and built .deb, which you can find there:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/mysql/debian/

As Baron writes it is not the number of rows returned by the query but number of rows accessed by the query will most likely be defining query performance. Of course not all row accessed are created equal (such as full table scan row accesses may be much faster than random index lookups row accesses in the same table) but this is very valuable data point to optimize query anyway.

Percona has a strong team of MySQL developers and consultants on board, so we decided to prepare MySQL releases with our patches and third-party patches which we think are very useful. We actually use these internally and for our customers.

Current releases include:

One of our customers was setting up box for MySQL LVM backups. The box had 2 RAID volumes (internal drives and enclosure) with database being stored on enclosure drives and internal drives used pretty much for OS and logs (database grew too large and so was moved to enclosure completely).

As database was large and active I thought it would make sense to have LVM undo space located on the internal drives so LVM and backup has less backup on the running system.

I’ve now published slides from my talk at Velocity conference on Percona web site. Enjoy.

Entry posted by peter | No comment

It looks like I never blogged about it but I’m going to be speaking on OSCON 2008. Similar to the last year presentation I’ll do overview of MySQL Open Source storage engines. I’ll do brief overview of different storage engines available out there as well as share benchmark results for some of them.

Entry posted by peter | No comment

Recently I had a customer ask me about loading two huge files into InnoDB with LOAD DATA INFILE. The goal was to load this data on many servers without putting it into the binary log. While this is generally a fast way to load data (especially if you disable unique key checks and foreign key checks), I recommended against this. There are several problems with the very large transaction caused by the single statement. We didn't want to split the file into pieces for the load for various reasons.

I have been helping customer today to resolve his lockups in production by downgrading from MySQL 5.1.25 to 5.0 We have other customers (and our own projects as well) which run on MySQL 5.1 successfully but I can't it is on par with MySQL 5.0 stability yet.

This given customer was running MyISAM on FreeBSD with quite basic queries, so may be there are some issues with FreeBSD and MySQL 5.1 still ?

Entry posted by peter | 11 comments