Parallel query execution is my favorite, non-existent, feature in MySQL. In all versions of MySQL – at least at the time of writing – when you run a single query it will run in one thread, effectively utilizing one CPU core only. Multiple queries run at the same time will be using different threads and will utilize more than one CPU core.

On multi-core machines – which is the majority of the hardware nowadays – and in the cloud, we have multiple cores available for use. With faster disks (i.e. SSD) we can’t utilize the full potential of IOPS with just one thread.

AWS Aurora (based on MySQL 5.6) now has a version which will support parallelism for SELECT queries (utilizing the read capacity of storage nodes underneath the Aurora cluster). In this article, we will look at how this can improve the reporting/analytical query performance in MySQL. I will compare AWS Aurora with MySQL …

Let’s look at some of the most popular Percona Database Performance Blog posts in 2018.

The closing of a year lends itself to looking back. And making lists. With the Percona Database Performance Blog, Percona staff and leadership work hard to provide the open source community with insights, technical support, predictions and metrics around multiple open source database software technologies. We’ve had nearly 4 million visits to the blog in 2018: thank you! We look forward to providing you with even better articles, news and information in 2019.

As 2018 moves into 2019, let’s take a quick look back at some of the most popular posts on the blog this year.

Top 10 Most Read

These posts had the most number of views (working down from the highest):

Over the last year, I have been pursuing a part time hobby project exploring ways to squeeze as much data as possible in MySQL. As you will see, there are quite a few different ways. Of course things like compression ratio matters a lot but, other items like performance of inserts, selects and updates, along with the total amount of bytes written are also important. When you start combining all the possibilities, you end up with a large set of compression options and, of course, I am surely missing a ton. This project has been a great learning opportunity and I hope you’ll enjoy reading about my results. Given the volume of results, I’ll have to write a series of posts. This post is the first of the series. I also have to mention that some of my work overlaps work done by one of my colleague, Yura Sorokin, in a …

Some time ago, a customer had a performance issue with an internal process. He was comparing, finding, and reporting the rows that were different between two tables. This is simple if you use a LEFT JOIN and an 

IS NULL

  comparison over the second table in the WHERE clause, but what if the column could be null? That is why he used UNION, GROUP BY and a HAVING clauses, which resulted in poor performance.

The challenge was to be able to compare each row using a LEFT JOIN over NULL values.

The challenge in more detail

I’m not going to use the customer’s real table. Instead, I will be comparing two sysbench tables with the same structure:

CREATE TABLE `sbtest1` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `k` int(10) unsigned DEFAULT NULL,
  `c` char(120) DEFAULT NULL,
  `pad` char(60) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY …

A few months ago I wrote a blog post on How to Capture Per Process Metrics in PMM. Since that time, Nick Cabatoff has made a lot of improvements to Process Exporter and I’ve improved the Grafana Dashboard to match.

I will not go through installation instructions, they are well covered in original blog post.  This post covers features available in release 0.4.0 Here are a few new features you might find of …

In this blog post we shall discuss how you can analyze slow query logs from Amazon Aurora for MySQL, (referred to as Amazon Aurora in the remaining blog). The tools and techniques explained here apply to the other MySQL compatible services available under Amazon Aurora. However, we’ll focus specially on analyzing slow logs from Amazon Aurora version 2 (MySQL 5.7 compatible) using pt-query-digest. We believe there is a bug in Aurora where it logs really big numbers for query execution and lock times for otherwise really fast queries.

So, the main steps we need are:

1. Enable slow query logging on your Amazon Aurora DB parameter group, apply the change when appropriate.
2. Download the slow log(s) that …

One of the common ways to classify database workloads is whether it is  “read intensive” or “write intensive”. In other words, whether the workload is dominated by reads or writes.

Why should you care? Because recognizing if the workload is read intensive or write intensive will impact your hardware choices, database configuration as well as what techniques you can apply for performance optimization and scalability.

This question looks trivial on the surface, but as you go deeper—complexity emerges. There are different “levels” of reads and writes for you to consider. You can also choose to look at event counts or at the time it takes to do operations. These can provide very different responses, especially as the cost difference between a single read and a single write can be an order of magnitude.

Let’s examine the TPC-C Benchmark from this point of view, or more specifically its …

MySQL Resource Groups, introduced in MySQL 8, provide the ability to manipulate the assignment of running threads to specific resources, thereby allowing the DBA to manage application priorities. Essentially, you can assign a thread to a specific virtual CPU. In this post, I’m going to take a look at how these might work in practice.

Let us start with a disclaimer.

What I am going to discuss here is NOT common practice. This is advanced load optimization, and you should approach/implement it ONLY if you are 100% sure of what you are doing, and, more importantly, if you know what you are doing, and why you are doing it.

Overview

MySQL 8 introduced a feature that is explained only in a single documentation page. This feature can help a lot if used correctly, and hopefully they will not deprecate or remove it after five minutes. It is well hidden in the …

Please join Percona’s CEO, Peter Zaitsev as he presents Forking or Branching – Lessons from the MySQL Community on Tuesday, August 28th, 2018 at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

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The MySQL Community offers a great example of various forks and branches, with MariaDB being the most well-known fork, and companies like Percona, Facebook and Alibaba maintaining their own branches.

In this presentation we will look at the history of MySQL, the causes of MySQL forking and branching, and …

Please join Percona’s CEO, Peter Zaitsev as he presents Using MySQL for Distributed Database Architectures on Tuesday, July 31st, 2018 at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

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In modern data architectures, we’re increasingly moving from single-node design systems to distributed architectures using multiple nodes – often spread across multiple databases and multiple continents. Such architectures bring many benefits (such as scalability and resiliency), but can also bring a lot of pain if incorrectly designed and …