In this blog, we’ll look at a mystery around setting the open_file_limit variable in MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL.

MySQL Server needs file descriptors to run. It uses them to open new connections, store tables in the cache, create temporary tables to resolve complicated queries and access persistent ones. If mysqld is not able to open new files when needed, it can stop functioning correctly. A common symptom of this issue is error 24: “Too many open files.”

The number of file descriptors

mysqld

 can open simultaneously is defined by the configuration

open_files_limit

 option. You would expect it to work like any other MySQL Server option: set in the configuration file, …

In this blog post, I’ll discuss some of the MySQL and MariaDB default configuration differences, focusing on MySQL 5.7 and MariaDB 10.2. Percona Server for MySQL uses the same defaults as MySQL, so I will not list them separately.

MariaDB Server is a general purpose open source database, created by the founders of MySQL. MariaDB Server (referred to as MariaDB for brevity) has similar roots as Percona Server for MySQL, but is quickly diverging from MySQL compatibility and growing on its own. MariaDB has become the default installation for several operating systems (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS/Fedora). Changes in the default variables can make a large difference in the out-of-box …

In my previous blog post, I talked about new general tablespaces in MySQL 8.0. Recently MySQL 8.0.3-rc was released, which includes a new data dictionary. My goal is to create one million tables in MySQL and test the performance.

Background questions

Q: Why million tables in MySQL? Is it even realistic? How does this happen?

Usually, millions of tables in MySQL is a result of “a schema per customer” Software as a Service (SaaS) approach. For the purposes of customer data isolation (security) and logical data partitioning (performance), each “customer” has a dedicated schema. You can think of a WordPress hosting service (or any CMS based hosting) where each …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how to avoid shared locks from subqueries.

I’m pretty sure most of you have seen an UPDATE statement matching rows returned from a SELECT query:

update ibreg set k=1 where id in (select id from ibcmp where id > 90000);

This query, when executed with

autocommit=1

, is normally harmless. However, this can have bad effects when combined with other statements in the same transaction that result in holding the shared locks from the SELECT query. But first, let me explain why the SELECT query would hold locks in the first place.

Due to InnoDB’s ACID properties, to make sure that the outer UPDATE statement has a consistent view of the matching rows from the SELECT query the server has to acquire a shared lock on those rows. No other thread should modify …

Welcome to the first day of the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017: Tutorials day! Technically the first day of the conference, this day focused on provided hands-on tutorials for people interested in learning directly how to use open source tools and technologies.

Today attendees went to training sessions taught by open source database experts and got first-hand experience configuring, working with, and experimenting with various open source technologies and software.

The first full day (which includes opening keynote speakers and breakout sessions) starts Tuesday 9/26 at 9:15 am.

Some of the tutorial topics covered today were:

…

For most people (including me until recently) database XA transactions are a fuzzy concept. In over eight years with Percona, I have never had to deal with XA transactions. Then a few weeks ago I got two customers having issues with XA transactions. That deserves a post.

XA 101

What are XA transactions? XA transactions are useful when you need to coordinate a transaction between different systems. The simplest example could be simply two storage engines within MySQL. Basically, it follows this sequence:

1. XA START
2. Some SQL statements
3. XA END
4. XA PREPARE
5. XA COMMIT or ROLLBACK

Once prepared, the XA transaction survives a MySQL crash. Upon restart, you’ll see something like this in the MySQL error log:

2017-08-23T14:53:54.189068Z 0 [Note] …

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

Percona Live Europe Dublin

Are you affected by the Ryanair flight cancellations? Have you made alternative arrangements? Have you registered for the community dinner? Even speakers have to register, so this is a separate ticket cost! There will be fun lightning talks in addition to food and drink.

You are, of course, already registered for Percona Live Europe Dublin, …

In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to run and use sysbench histograms.

One of the features of sysbench that I often I see overlooked (and rarely used) is its ability to produce detailed query response time histograms in addition to computing percentile numbers. Looking at histograms together with throughput or latency over time provides many additional insights into query performance.

Here is how you get detailed sysbench histograms and performance over time:

sysbench --rand-type=uniform --report-interval=1 --percentile=99 --time=300 --histogram --mysql-password=sbtest oltp_point_select --table_size=400000000 run

There are a few command line options to consider:

• report-interval=1 – prints out the current performance measurements every second, which helps see if …

Welcome to another post in our series of interview blogs for the upcoming Percona Live Europe 2017 in Dublin. This series highlights a number of talks that will be at the conference and gives a short preview of what attendees can expect to learn from the presenter.

This blog post is with Dana Van Aken, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her talk is titled Automatic Database Management System Tuning Through Large-Scale Machine Learning. DBMSs are difficult to manage because they have hundreds of configuration “knobs” that control factors such as the amount of memory to use for …

Welcome to another post in our series of interview blogs for the upcoming Percona Live Europe 2017 in Dublin. This series highlights a number of talks that will be at the conference and gives a short preview of what attendees can expect to learn from the presenter.

This blog post is with Charity Majors, CEO/Cofounder of Honeycomb. Her talk is Debugging with Logs (and Other Events). Her presentation covers some of the lessons every engineer should know (and often learns the hard way): why good logging solutions are so expensive, why treating your logs as strings can be costly and dangerous, how logs can impact code …