Cloud service provider Backblaze has updated its earlier study of hard drive failure rates (Nov 2013) in its own infrastructure – from 27,000 to more than 34,000 drives, and the new report (Sep 2014) is quite informative. Hitachi comes out pretty high, Western Digital has produced some good drives, but Seagate tends to come out worst. Each brand does have good and not-so-good models so there’s no single right answer, and for any new model you’ll always be dealing with an unknown factor.

Backblaze also found that consumer drives actually perform well compared to enterprise grade drives, and once price is taking into account the enterprise drives just …

In some cases it is not possible to use an index to optimize a JOIN. This may for example happen when you query the Performance Schema. As a result these kind of queries can be very slow; however in MySQL 5.6 and later you can use a trick to improve the performance considerably.

As a working example in this post, I will use the schema_table_statistics view in the sys schema. Since the view involves the schema, I will create a reasonable large number of databases and tables for the test:

shell$ for ((i=0; i<100; i++)); do
>    echo "Database ${i}"
>    mysql -e "CREATE DATABASE db${i}"
>    for ((j=0; j<100; j++)); do
>        mysql -e "CREATE TABLE db${i}.t${j} (id int unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment PRIMARY KEY, val varchar(10) NOT NULL) …

On my post last week, I analysed some of the most common compression tools and formats, and its compression speed and ratio. While that could give us a good idea of the performance of those tools, the analysis would be incomplete without researching the decompression. This is particularly true for database backups as, for those cases where the compression process is performed outside of the production boxes, you may not care too much about compression times. In that case, even if it is relatively slow, it will not affect the performance of your MySQL server (or whatever you are using). The decompression time, however, can be critical, as it may influence in many cases the MTTR of your whole system.

Testing …

To learn about the many factors that can affect the performance of the MySQL Database, take the MySQL Performance Tuning course.

You will learn:

• How your hardware and operating system can affect performance
• How to set up and logging to improve performance
• Best practices for backup and recovery
• And much more

You can take this 4-day instructor-led course through the following formats:

• Training-on-Demand: Start training within 24 hours of registering for training, following lectures at your own pace through streaming video and booking time on a lab environment to suit your schedule.
• Live-Virtual Event: Attend a live event from your own desk, no travel required. Choose …

We've all heard the hype.  MySQL 5.6 is packed with amazing new features that address all our database problems.  5.6 deals with replication and HA and performance and monitoring and security and features.  It just may cure cancer.

In fact it's been out for ages.  It went GA  …

Introduction

Evaluating the performance of database systems is a very demanding task. There are a lot of hard choices to be made, e.g.:

• What operating system and operating system version is to be used
• What configuration setup is to be used
• What benchmarks are to be used and how long are the warm-up and measure times
• What test setups are to be used
• What version of the database management system is used
• What storage engine is used

While performance evaluation is mostly machine time, there is still a lot of hard work for the human monitoring the tests. In this blog post we have made following choices:

• We’re using an Intel Xeon E5-2690 @ 2.9GHz CPU containing 32-cores and Linux 3.4.12 with 132G main memory. The database is stored on a Fusion-IO ioDrive2 Duo 2.41TB Firmware v7.2.5, rev 110646, using Driver 3.3.4 build 5833069. The …

This is the story of cold blocks and mismatched instances and how they will cause you pain and cost you money until you understand why. Most of the clients that we support run on the Amazon cloud using either RDS … Continue reading →

MySQL Fabric is a tool included on MySQL Utilities that helps you to manage your MySQL instances.
It works by basically adding a new layer between your application and MySQL instances, which can provide an easy way to use sharding and build a high available system.

For More information about what is MySQL Fabric, please follow the documentation.

To install our Fabric environment, we will have to configure 4 servers, I will use the follow names and IP on this tutorial:

fabric1 (192.168.0.200) - fabric
mysql1 (192.168.0.201) - mysql master
mysql2 (192.168.0.202) - mysql slave
mysql3 (192.168.0.203) - mysql slave

Note: I’m running CentOS 6.5 on all servers.

1. Add mysql repo on all 4 machines, please read …

On Wednesday I gave a presentation on “How to Avoid Even More Common (but Deadly) MySQL Development Mistakes” for Percona MySQL Webinars.  If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions.  I answered as many as we had time for  during the session, but here are all the questions with my complete answers:

Q: Disk bandwidth also not infinite

Indeed, you’re right! …

InnoDB has proven to be a reliable data storage engine for modern, high concurrency database systems. It is fully ACID compliant, and supports a wide range of isolation modes, from READ-UNCOMMITEED to SERIALIZABLE.

InnoDB multiversion concurrency control (MVCC) enables records and tables to be updated without the overhead associated with row-level locking mechanisms. The MVCC implementation in InnoDB largely eliminates the need to lock tables or rows during updates, and enables good performance for high concurrency workloads.

To learn more about this subject and related performance tuning topics tuning, take the MySQL Performance Tuning training course. This 4-day, instructor-led course is available as:

…