This week we discuss features of Percona Server 5.6 compared to MySQL 5.6. Ear Candy is about pt-upgrade, and At the Movies is a set of lightning talks.

Events
DB Hangops - every other Wednesay at noon Pacific time

Upcoming MySQL events

Percona Live London 2013 is happening Monday November 11th and Tuesday November 12th, 2013 at the Millenium Gloucester Conference Center

Training
SkySQL Trainings

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MySQL Connect 2013 has been a great edition. There was of course a lot of nice announcements of improvements in the the core MySQL server technology. One of the major announcement that received a lot of buzz was MySQL Fabric. MySQL Fabric is an infrastructure component aimed at simplifying construction of a highly available, sharded, [...]

PDP 11/70 front panel (similar to the 11/45)

Out of curiosity, I’ve developed a USE Method-based performance checklist for Unix 7th Edition on a PDP-11/45, which I’ve been running via a PDP simulator. 7th Edition is from 1979, and was the first Unix with iostat(1M) and pstat(1M), enabling more serious performance analysis from shipped tools. Were I to write a checklist for earlier Unixes, it would contain many more “unknowns”.

I often work on the illumos kernel, a direct descendant of Unix …

In this post, I’ll provide an example USE Method-based performance checklist for FreeBSD, for identifying common bottlenecks and errors. This is intended to be used early in a performance investigation, before moving onto more time consuming methodologies. This should be helpful for anyone using FreeBSD, especially system administrators.

This was developed on FreeBSD 10.0 alpha, and focuses on tools shipped by default. With DTrace, I was able to create a few new one-liners to answer some metrics. See the notes below the tables.

Physical Resources

It all started with a goal to make InnoDB temporary tables more effective. Temporary table semantics are blessed with some important characteristics that can help us simplify lot of operations.

• Temporary tables are not visible across connections
• Temporary tables lifetime is limited to connection lifetime (unless user explicitly drops it).

What does this means in to InnoDB ?

• REDO logging can be avoided for temporary tables and related objects since temporary tables do not survive a shutdown or crash.
• Temporary table definitions can be maintained in-memory without persisting to the disk.
• Locking constraints can be relaxed since only one client can see these tables.
• Change buffering can be avoided since the majority of temporary tables are short-lived.

In order to implement these changes in InnoDB we took a bit different approach:

On September 21st, during the opening keynote at MySQL Connect 2013, Tomas Ulin disclosed the release of MySQL 5.7.2. This is a milestone release that includes several new features. Unlike the Previous one, which was just a point of pride, where Oracle was stating its continuous commitment to releasing new versions of MySQL. In MySQL 5.7.2, we see several new features:

• First and foremost, performance. The announcement slides say MySQL 5.7.2 is 95% faster than MySQL 5.6 and 172% faster than MySQL 5.5. I don’t know yet in which circumstances these numbers hold true, but I am sure someone at Percona will soon prove or disprove the claim.
• Performance Schema tables for several aspects:
  • …

A quick overview of the InnoDB performance improvements for both read-only and read-write loads.

“Will you expand the next webcast to 90 minutes? This one was too interesting to last only one hour” was one of the questions we got during the “Tuning MySQL for Great Product Performance: The Fundamentals, Updated for MySQL 5.6” webinar on August 27th.  The engineers on Q&A got a lot of good (and more technical) questions during the webcast.  For those of you who were unable to join us live, I’ve posted the questions and answers below, and you can listen to a recording of the webinar and get a .pdf of slides at this link.

The webinar was created specifically for the software and …

In talking to existing MongoDB users and TokuMX evaluators, I’ve often heard that the performance of MongoDB is very good as long as your working data set fits in RAM. The story continues that if your working data set grows to be larger than the RAM on your server, the built-in sharding capabilities of MongoDB allow you to scale horizontally.

As my benchmarking presentation at Percona Live 2013 pointed out, I’m never one to accept something without at least running it once myself. I decided to run my Sysbench for MongoDB benchmark on an in-memory workload, meaning that all of the data fits …

MySQL Tech Day @Paris

We're happy to announce you that MySQL Tech Day will take place in Paris on Oct 10, 2013 in Oracle main office. It'll be a full day event giving you an occasion to listen directly from Oracle developers about most of the improvements made recently within MySQL 5.6 and 5.7 development.