The latest from the MySQL community

The MySQL database provides top-level performance. Here are two courses to help you get the most out of your MySQL system.

Troubleshooting MySQL Performance With Sveta Smirnova

This 1 day seminar is an opportunity to interact with Sveta Smirnova, MySQL engineer, expert on MySQL Performance and author of MySQL Troubleshooting.

Sign up for this seminar scheduled for February 28th, 2013 in London, England. 

Sveta will start from basics, working towards more advanced cases that DBAs would usually need years of experience to identify or …

Get the most from MySQL Server's top-level performance by improving your understanding of performance tuning techniques.

MySQL Performance Tuning Class

In this 4 day class, you'll learn practical, safe, highly efficient ways to optimize performance for the MySQL Server. You can take this class as:

• Training-on-Demand: Start training within 24 hours of registering and follow the instructor-led lecture material through streaming video at your own pace. Schedule time lab-time to perform the hands-on exercises at your convenience.
• Live-Virtual Class: Follow the live instructor led class from your own desk - no travel required. There are already a range of events on the schedule to suit different timezones and with delivery in languages including English and German.
• In-Class Event: Travel to a training center to follow this class.

For more information on this class, to see the …

After reading a blog post about MySQL Tuning scripts I thought about the possibility of a fully Automatic MySQL Tuner.

This is how it would work:
A daemon which would connect to your database server and then fetch status variables, just like mysqltuner and such. Then the daemon could decide that a parameter would need to be adjusted and then run "SET GLOBAL …" and write a /etc/mysql/autotuner.cf file which should be included in your my.cnf.

It should have a min/max setting for each option and some thresholds.

Why?

• Not everyone is a DBA
• It's could better than the default settings is most cases. Luckily many defaults are updated in 5.6.
• You're not using my-huge.cf, are you?
• It could help when there are changing workloads
• It might be sufficient for …

I was lucky enough to attend PyCon-AU recently and one talk in particular highlighted the process of web server optimisation.

Graham Dumpleton’s add-in talk Web Server Bottlenecks And Performance Tuning available on YouTube (with the majority of PyCon-AU talks)

The first big note at the beginning is that the majority of the delay in user’s perception of a website is caused by the browser rendering the page. Though not covered in the talk for those that haven’t used the tool YSlow (for Firefox and Chrome) or Google’s Developer Tools (ctrl-alt-I in Chrome), both tools will …

When you're spoiled with Oracle's fabulous query transformation capabilities and its really well-done cost-based optimiser, then you might forget how difficult SQL query tuning used to be in the "old days" or with those less sophisticated databases. Here's a really nice explanation of the various means of implementing an ANTI-JOIN in MySQL: http://explainextended.com/2009/09/18/not-in-vs-not-exists-vs-left-join-is-null-mysql/

Read the original article at A CTO Must Never Do This…

A couple years back I was contacted to look at a very strange problem.

The firm ran flash sales. An email goes out at noon, the website traffic explodes for a couple of hours, then settles back down to a trickle.

Of course you might imagine where this is going. During that peak, the MySQL database was brought to its knees. I was asked to do analysis during this peak load, and identify and fix problems. Make it go faster, please!

First day on the job I’m working with a team of outsourced DBAs. I was also working with a sort of swat team chatting on SKYPE, while monitoring the systems closely.

…

This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship.

Some basic facts

• Most of …

This post is being constantly updated as we find out more useful information on Momentum tuning. Last update: 2012-05-05.

About 2 months ago I’ve joined LivingSocial technical operations team and one of my first tasks there was to figure out a way to make our MTAs perform better and deliver faster. We use a really great product called Momentum MTA (former Ecelerity) and it is really fast, but it is always good to be able to squeeze as much performance as possible so I’ve started looking for a ways to make our system faster.

While working on it I’ve created a set of scripts to integrate Momentum with Graphite for all kinds of crazy stats graphing, those scripts will be opensourced soon, but for now I’ve decided to share a few tips about performance-related changes …

There are about a gazillion FAQs and HOWTOs out there that talk about XFS configuration, RAID IO alignment, and mount point options.  I wanted to try to put some of that information together in a condensed and simplified format that will work for the majority of use cases.  This is not meant to cover every single tuning option, but rather to cover the important bases in a simple and easy to understand way.

Let’s say you have a server with standard hardware RAID setup running conventional HDDs.

RAID setup

For the sake of simplicity you create one single RAID logical volume that covers all your available drives.  This is the easiest setup to configure and maintain and is the best choice for operability in the majority of normal configurations.  Are there ways to squeeze more performance out of a server by dividing the logical volumes: perhaps, but it requires a lot of fiddling and custom tuning to …

Performance schema performance tuning One of the most important question users ask before deciding to use the performance schema is: what is the overhead ? The underlying concern of course is to make sure deploying the performance schema does not negatively impact production ("First, do no harm").
The question is simple, and yet the answer is not so simple, as it depends on so many things.
As seen in some benchmarks done already, the overhead when using the performance schema can vary a lot, and in some cases really causes degradations.
A lot of time has been spent investigating the root causes (note the plural form) for the performance schema overhead in general, so I think it is a good time to share current findings.

Server workload Analysing performances, and testing the effects of different code or configuration changes, can hardly be done in a vacuum. That's where benchmarks come in.
The problem with …