Following are benchmark results comparing Tokutek TokuDB and Percona XtraDB at scale factor 10 on the Star Schema benchmark. I’m posting this on the Shard-Query blog because I am going to compare the performance of Shard-Query on the benchmark on these two engines. First, however, I think it is important to see how they perform in isolation without concurrency.

Because I am going to be testing Shard-Query, I have chosen to partition the “fact” table (lineorder) by month. I’ve attached the full DDL at the end of the post as well as the queries again for reference.

I want to note a few things about the results:
First and foremost, TokuDB was configured to use quicklz compression (the default) and InnoDB compression was not used. No tuning of TokuDB was performed, which means it will use up to 50% of memory by default. Various InnoDB tuning options were set (see the end of the post) but the most important is that the …

Part 1 - Installing Holland Backup ManagerI spoke at Percona Live Conference and Expo 2013 about backups. Part of the talk focussed on the backup products in the ecosystem that will help you make a backup of your MySQL data. This follow-up article touches on one of the frameworks from my talk, the Holland Backup Manager. I was able to have a chat with some of the guys on the Rackspace booth about Holland and had some questions regarding features answered.

Holland is a backup framework focussing mostly on MySQL backups but it is pluggable so you can write add backup providers to extend it to your own needs. Using the framework you're able to configure and deploy backup jobs of varying scope to multiple machines. The framework which was originally developed at Rackspace, currently supports mysqldump, lvm, xtrabackup and pgdump (Postgres) also sqllite. The latest version is …

Percona Server for MySQL version 5.5.31-30.3

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server for MySQL 5.5.31-30.3 on May 24, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.31, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.31-30.3 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s …

Can’t find what you want or need? Do you have a tip or trick to share? Do you want to lament over a technical woe? If yes, then blog and send it to us for the Log Buffer, just as this one contains tips, tricks, and woes.
Oracle:

Fahd Mirza and Tanel Poder throw the spotlight on the v$cell_thread_history view with respect to the Exadata.

Mark W. Farnham‘s rightsizing goes on with a roar, as he declares that he is pretty much a green sneaker, tree …

I am currently working with a large customer and I am involved with servers located in two data centers, one with Solaris servers and the other one with Linux servers. The Solaris side is cleverly setup using zones and ZFS and this provides a very low virtualization overhead. I learned quite a lot about these technologies while looking at this, thanks to Corey Mosher.

On the Linux side, we recently deployed a pair on servers for backup purpose, boxes with 64 300GB SAS drives, 3 raid controllers and 192GB of RAM. These servers will run a few slave instances each of production database servers and will perform the backups.  The write load is not excessive so a single server can easily handle the write load of all the MySQL instances.  The original idea was to configure them with raid-10 + LVM, making sure to …

Drupal is one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) and is used increasingly in high-visibility sites, such as www.whitehouse.gov. This has brought a lot of attention on how to get the most performance out of Drupal and how to improve the availability of such sites. In this blog series I'll take you through the basics and on through to designing your own HA Drupal site.

But first, we need to understand what the challenges are in getting Drupal (or indeed any CMS) working on multiple servers in such a way as to ensure high availability and performance.

read more

Drupal is one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) and is used increasingly in high-visibility sites, such as www.whitehouse.gov. This has brought a lot of attention on how to get the most performance out of Drupal and how to improve the availability of such sites. In this blog series I'll take you through the basics and on through to designing your own HA Drupal site.

But first, we need to understand what the challenges are in getting Drupal (or indeed any CMS) working on multiple servers in such a way as to ensure high availability and performance.

read more

One of my old students and lab assistants stopped by to show his fiancée the BYU-Idaho campus. It was a long trip since he lives in Macao, China.

He kindly brought me a copy of my Oracle Database 11g and MySQL 5.6 Developer Handbook in simplified Chinese. He’s holding it in the photo.

That makes three books translated into Chinese, which made my day. It’ll be interesting to see if the new MySQL Workbench: Data Modeling & Development book gets …

Whenever I stick my head into the MySQL storage engine API, I’m reminded of a MySQL User Conference from several years ago now.

Specifically, I’m reminded of a slide from an early talk at the MySQL User Conference by Paul McCullagh describing developing PBXT. For “How to write a Storage Engine for MySQL”, it went something like this:

1. Develop basic INSERT (write_row) support – INSERT INTO t1 VALUES (42)
2. Develop full table scan (rnd_init, rnd_next, rnd_end)  - SELECT * from t1
3. If you’re sane, stop here.

A lot of people stop at step 3. It’s a really good place to stop too. It avoids most of the tricky parts that are unexpected, undocumented and unlogical (yes, I’m inventing words here).

You might find a warning like the below in your error log:

130522 17:54:18 [Warning] Unsafe statement written to the binary log using statement format since BINLOG_FORMAT = STATEMENT. Statements writing to a table with an auto-increment column after selecting from another table are unsafe because the order in which rows are retrieved determines what (if any) rows will be written. This order cannot be predicted and may differ on master and the slave.
Statement: INSERT INTO tbl2 SELECT * FROM tbl1 WHERE col IN (417,523)

What do MariaDB and MySQL mean with this warning? The server can’t guarantee that this exact query, with STATEMENT based replication, will always yield identical results on the slave.

Does that mean that you have to use ROW based (or MIXED) replication? Possibly, but not necessarily.

For this type of query, it primarily refers to the fact that without …