For years it was very easy to defend InnoDB’s advantage over competition – covering index reads were saving I/O operations and CPU everywhere, table space and I/O management allowed to focus on database and not on file systems or virtual memory behaviors, and for past few years InnoDB compression was the way to have highly efficient OLTP (or in our case – SGTP – Social Graph Transaction Processing) environments. Until one day (for some it came sooner, for others later)…

InnoDB team announced that it will change how it is going to do compression in the future and that old ways (that we rely on) will be all gone. I’m not exactly sure if there was any definite messaging on the future of existing methods, but Oracle in public will never put out a roadmap, and there’s lots of uncertainty involved then. Unfortunately, with this uncertainty, we probably lost quite some momentum in InnoDB engineering efforts (we don’t get to see some …

One of our Percona Support customers recently reported that Percona XtraBackup failed with a page corruption error on an InnoDB table. The customer thought it was a problem or bug in the Percona XtraBackup tool. After investigation we found that an InnoDB page was actually corrupted and a Percona XtraBackup tool caught the error as expected and hence the backup job failed.

I thought this would be an interesting topic and worthy of a blog post. In this article I will describe the innochecksum tool, when and how to use it and what are the possible fixes if an InnoDB table suffers from …

Facebook recently made opensource, osquery. It gives you operating system data via SQL queries! Its very neat, and you can test this even on MacOSX (it works on that platform & Linux). It is by far the project with the most advanced functionality, linked here in this post.

I noticed that rather quickly, there was a PostgreSQL project, called pgosquery, based on Foreign Data Wrappers with a similar idea. (apparently it was written in less than 15 minutes; so a much lower learning curve than the regular MySQL storage engine interface)

I immediately thought about an older MySQL project, by Chip Turner (then at Google, now at Facebook), called …

Facebook’s Yoshinori Matsunobu

I spoke with Facebook database engineer Yoshinori Matsunobu here at Percona Live 2014 today about a range of topics, including MySQL at Facebook, the company’s recent move to WebScaleSQL, new MySQL flash storage technologies – and why attending the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo each year is very important to him.

Facebook engineers are hosting several sessions at this year’s conference and all have been standing room only. That’s not too surprising considering that Facebook, the undisputed king of online social networks, has 1.23 billion monthly active …

http://webscalesql.org/

yeah , big buzz around that one

So I decided to check the install process:

1. Clone the repo from

root@webscalesql-5.6.clean:[Mon Mar 31 11:37:11][~]$ cd /opt/
root@webscalesql-5.6.clean:[Mon Mar 31 11:37:15][/opt]$ mkdir installs
root@webscalesql-5.6.clean:[Mon Mar 31 11:37:17][/opt]$ cd installs/
root@webscalesql-5.6.clean:[Mon Mar 31 11:37:19][/opt/installs]$ git clone https://github.com/webscalesql/webscalesql-5.6.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /opt/installs/webscalesql-5.6/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 30397, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (12678/12678), done.
remote: Total 30397 (delta 18716), reused 27620 (delta 16936)
Receiving objects: 100% (30397/30397), 47.99 MiB | 460 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (18716/18716), done.

2. …

Facebook, the undisputed king of online social networks, has 1.23 billion monthly active users collectively contributing to an ocean of data-intensive tasks – making the company one of the world’s top MySQL users.

A small army of Facebook MySQL experts will be converging on Santa Clara, Calif. next week where several of them are leading sessions at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. I had the chance to chat virtually with four of them about their sessions: Steaphan Greene, Evan Elias, …

Twitter’s Calvin Sun

Twitter’s Calvin Sun (@Calvinsun2012) is looking forward to the fast-approaching Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo this April 1-4 in Santa Clara, Calif. He’ll be speaking, yes, but he’s also looking forward to learning from his peers – particularly those at Facebook. Both companies, he explained, are in the rather unique positions of unprecedented rapid growth and ever-expanding performance demands.

Calvin is a senior engineering manager at Twitter, where he manages MySQL development. Prior to that, he managed the InnoDB team at Oracle. Calvin also worked for MySQL Inc. from 2006 to 2008, managing MySQL storage engines development. He has over 15+ years of database development experience.

He said MySQL is the data storage technology behind …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2014 is just two months away. I’m very excited about this year’s event which continues our tradition of open technical discussions and inviting all parties to the table.

We have a great amount of technical talks from Oracle – I’m especially excited about future-focused talks shedding some light about what to expect in MySQL 5.7 and beyond. This content is best covered by developers actually designing the system and writing the code. We also have great coverage of MySQL alternatives from Percona and MariaDB. You can view the entire program here.

It is great to see well-rounded coverage of many …

There is much more to write about all the work we do at Facebook with memory management efficiency on our systems, but there was this one detour investigation in the middle of 2012 that I had to revisit recently courtesy of Wikipedia.

There are lots of factors that make machines page out memory segments into disk, thus slowing everything down and locking software up – from file system cache pressure to runaway memory leaks to kernel drivers being greedy. But certain swap-out scenarios are confusing – systems seem to have lots of memory available, with proper settings file system cache should not cause swapping, and obviously in production environment all the memory leaks are ironed out.

And yet in mid-2012 we noticed that our new kernel machines were swapping out for no obvious reason. When it comes to swapping, MySQL community will always point to Jeremy’s post on …

Percona founder and CEO Peter Zaitsev delivers the opening keynote at Percona Live 2013 in Santa Clara, Calif.

MySQL gurus from Oracle, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp (and more) have submitted papers and will speak at the third annual Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2014 in sunny Santa Clara, California this coming April 1-4.

If you attended last April’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo – and/or last month’s Percona Live London 2013 conference – then you understand the value of learning from some of the world’s best and brightest system architects and developers. So you might want to consider registering now and take advantage of …