In this blog post, we’ll look at how ioping can be used with other tools to understand and troubleshoot storage performance, specifically as it relates to MySQL workloads.

I recently ran into ioping, a nice little utility by Konstantin Khlebnikov that checks storage latency.  

For me, the main beauty of ioping is its simplicity and familiarity. It takes after the ubiquitous ping tool, but “pings” the storage instead of the network device.

First, let’s talk about what this tool isn’t: it isn’t a benchmark tool to stress load your storage as heavily as possible. For that, you can use iozone or sysbench (among many others). This also isn’t a tool for looking at …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Happy New Year. Here’s to 2018 being a great year in the open source database world. What is in store for us? Probably: MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB Server 10.3 as generally available. What will we see in the rest of the space? Clouds? All I know is that we move fast, and it’s going to be fun to see what unfolds.

The biggest news this week may not necessarily be database related; it focused on CPU security vulnerabilities and the potential slowdowns of your servers once the updates are applied. Please do read Meltdown and Spectre: CPU Security Vulnerabilities. Peter Zaitsev himself, got quoted in …

In this post, we’ll look at how to improve queries using generated columns and ProxySQL instead of implementing a referenced table.

Developers and architects don’t always have the time or complete information to properly analyze and design a database. That is why we see tables with more fields than needed, or with incorrect types. The best solution is implementing a change in the database schema and/or application level. In this post, we’ll look at an example of generated columns (using a char field) instead of creating a referenced table, and how using generated columns and ProxySQL avoids changes at the application level.

For this example, I will be using the film table of the Sakila database (with some changes). The original film table had a language_id as tinyint, which refers to the language table:

As we close out the holiday season, let’s look at some data that tells us how to guarantee a successful Black Friday (from a database perspective).

There are certain peak times of the year where companies worldwide hold their breath in the hope that their databases do not become overloaded or unresponsive. A large percentage of yearly profits are achieved in a matter of hours during peak events. It is critical that the database environment remains online and responsive. According to a recent survey, users will not wait more than 2.5 seconds for a site to load before navigating elsewhere. Percona has partnered with many clients over the years to ensure success during these critical events. Our goal is always to provide our clients with the most responsive, stable open-source database environments in order to meet their business needs.

First Stop: Germany …

Join Percona’s, CEO and Co-Founder, Peter Zaitsev as he presents InnoDB Performance Optimization on Wednesday, December 20, 2017, at 11:00 am PST / 2:00 pm EST (UTC-8).

InnoDB is one of the most commonly used storage engines for MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL. It balances high reliability with high performance and is the focus of the majority of storage engine development by the MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL teams.

This webinar looks at InnoDB, including new developments in MySQL 5.7 as well as Percona Server for MySQL. In it, Peter explains how to use it, and many of the configuration options that help you to get the best performance from your application.

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Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents 2017 Year in Review for Open Source Database Software on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 7:00 am PST / 10:00 am EST (UTC-8).

Register Here

2017 is soon coming to an end, and it’s good to pause and take a look at the past year to see the impact of new software release. Colin will discuss the changes, growth and trends that have affected software producers and enterprises using open source.

Key topics will include:

• How has the software supply chain landscape …

This post is a hands-on look at ZFS with MySQL.

In my previous post, I highlighted the similarities between MySQL and ZFS. Before going any further, I’d like you to be able to play and experiment with ZFS. This post shows you how to configure ZFS with MySQL in a minimalistic way on either Ubuntu 16.04 or Centos 7.

Installation

In order to be able to use ZFS, you need some available storage space. For storage – since the goal here is just to have a hands-on experience – we’ll use a simple file as a storage device. Although simplistic, I have now been using a similar setup on my laptop for nearly three years (just can’t get rid of it, it is too useful). For simplicity, I suggest you use a small Centos7 or Ubuntu 16.04 VM with one core, 8GB of disk and 1GB of RAM.

First, you need to install …

Join Percona’s Software Engineer (PXC Lead), Krunal Bauskar as he presents Percona XtraDB Cluster 101 on Thursday, December 7, 2017, at 7:00 am PST / 10:00 am EST (UTC-8).

Tags: Percona XtraDB Cluster, MySQL, High Availability, Clustering

Experience Level: Beginner

Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) is a multi-master solution that offers virtual synchronous replication among clustering node. It is based on the Codership Galera replication library. In this session, we will explore some key features of Percona XtraDB Cluster that make it enterprise ready including some recently added 5.7 exclusive features.

This webinar is an introductory and …

In this post, we’ll briefly look at window functions in MySQL 8.0.

One of the major features coming to MySQL 8.0 is the support of Window functions. The detailed documentation is already available here Window functions. I wanted to take a quick look at the cases where window functions help.

Probably one the most frequent limitations in MySQL SQL syntax was analyzing a dataset. I tried to find the answer to the following question: “Find the Top N entries for each group in a grouped result.”

To give an example, I will refer to this request on Stackoverflow. While there is a solution, it …

In this blog post, I investigate a case of spiking InnoDB Rows inserted in the absence of a write query, and find internal temporary tables to be the culprit.

Recently I was investigating an interesting case for a customer. We could see the regular spikes on a graph depicting “InnoDB rows inserted” metric (jumping from 1K/sec to 6K/sec), however we were not able to correlate those spikes with other activity. The

innodb_row_inserted

 graph (picture from PMM demo) looked similar to this (but on a much larger scale):

Other graphs (Com_*, Handler_*) did not show any spikes like that. I’ve examined the logs (we were not able to enable general log or change the threshold of the slow log), performance_schema, triggers, stored procedures, prepared statements and even reviewed the binary logs. However, I was not able to find any single …