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 …

In Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) 1.13 we have adopted Prometheus 2, and with this comes a dramatic improvement in resource usage, along with performance improvements!

What does it mean for you? This means you can have a significantly larger number of servers and database instances monitored by the same PMM installation. Or you can reduce the instance size you use to monitor your environment and save some money.

Let’s look at some stats!

CPU Usage

We can see an approximate 5x and 8x reduction of CPU usage on these two PMM Servers. Depending on the workload, we see CPU usage reductions to range between 3x and 10x.

Disk Writes

There is also less disk write bandwidth required:

On this instance, the bandwidth reduction is “just” 1.5x times. …

PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL and MongoDB performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL and MongoDB servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

The most significant feature in this release is Prometheus 2, however we also packed a lot of visual changes into release 1.13:

• Prometheus 2 – Consumes less resources, and Dashboards load faster!
• New Dashboard: Network Overview – New dashboard for all things IPv4!
• New Dashboard: NUMA Overview – New Dashboard! …

PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL and MongoDB performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL and MongoDB servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

In release 1.12, we invested our efforts in the following areas:

• Visual Explain in Query Analytics – Gain insight into MySQL’s query optimizer for your queries
• New Dashboard – InnoDB Compression Metrics – Evaluate effectiveness of InnoDB Compression
• New Dashboard – MySQL Command/Handler Compare – Contrast MySQL instances side by side
• Updated …

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 Now

During the MySQL Troubleshooting webinar series, I covered many monitoring and logging tools such as:

• General, slow, audit, binary, error log files
• Performance Schema
• Information Schema
• System …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL® and MongoDB® performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL® and MongoDB® servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

In PMM Release 1.11.0, we deliver the following changes:

• Configurable MySQL Slow Log Rotation – enable or disable rotation, and specify how many files to keep on disk
• Predictable Graphs – we’ve updated our formulas to use aggregation functions over time for more reliable graphs
• MySQL Exporter Parsing of my.cnf – we’ve improved how we read my.cnf
• Annotation improvements – passing …

It’s hard to believe Percona Live 2018 starts on Monday! We’re looking forward to seeing everyone in Santa Clara next week! Here are some quick highlights to remember:

• In addition to all the amazing sessions and keynotes we’ve announced, we’ll be hosting the MySQL Community Awards and the Lightning Talks on Monday during the Opening Reception.
• We’ve also got a great lineup of demos in the exhibit hall all day Tuesday and Wednesday – be sure to stop by and learn more about open source database products and tools.
• On Monday, we …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL® and MongoDB® performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL® and MongoDB® servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

We focused mainly on two features in 1.10.0, but there are also several notable improvements worth highlighting:

• Annotations – Record and display Application Events as Annotations using pmm-admin annotate
• Grafana 5.0 – Improved visualization effects
• Switching between Dashboards – Restored functionality to preserve host when switching dashboards
• New Percona XtraDB Cluster Overview graphs …

In this blog post, I’ll examine when looking at raw MySQL query logs can be more useful than working with tools that only have summary data.

In my previous blog post, I wrote about analyzing MySQL Slow Query Logs with ClickHouse and ClickTail. One of the follow-up questions I got is when do you want to do that compared to just using tools like Percona Monitoring and Management or VividCortex, which provide a beautiful interface for detailed analyses (rather than spartan SQL interface).    

MySQL Logs

We’ve posted the Percona Live 2018 keynote addresses for the seventh annual Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018, taking place April 23-25, 2018 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. 

This year’s keynotes explore topics ranging from how cloud and open source database adoption accelerates business growth, to leading-edge emerging technologies, to the importance of MySQL 8.0, to the growing popularity of PostgreSQL.

We’re excited by the great lineup of speakers, including our friends at Alibaba Cloud, Grafana, Microsoft, Oracle, Upwork and VividCortex, the innovative leaders on the Cool Technologies panel, and Brendan Gregg …