Part of the InnoDB duties, being an MVCC-implementing storage engine, is to get rid of–purge–the old versions of the records as they become obsolete.  In MySQL 5.1 this is done by the master InnoDB thread.  Since then, InnoDB has been moving towards the parallelized purge: in MySQL 5.5 there is an option to have a single separate dedicated purge thread and in MySQL 5.6.2 one can have multiple dedicated purge threads.

Percona Server 5.1 supports multiple purge threads too, although using more than one is considered experimental at the moment. Unfortunately this patch hasn’t been ported to Percona Server 5.5 yet.

Let’s test these two implementations and find out what benefits, if any, do the additional purge threads bring.

The test workload makes a long history list and then lets purge thread(s) work through it while having a regular OLTP load on the server.  The OLTP part of this is provided by …

We see demand on MacOS binaries and decided to prepare binaries you can download and use. The are marked as “experimental”, as we do not have big history of using MacOS in production, so we are looking for your feedback and bug reports.

Binaries:

• Percona Server 5.5 : http://www.percona.com/downloads/TESTING/Percona-Server-55/Percona-Server-5.5.11-20.2/release-5.5.11-20.2/114/MacOSX/
• Percona Server 5.1: http://www.percona.com/downloads/TESTING/Percona-Server-51/Percona-Server-5.1.56-12.7/release-5.1.56-12.7/226/MacOSX/
• Percona XtraBackup: …

We just pushed to sysbench support for workload against multiple tables ( traditionally it used only single table).

It is available from launchpad source tree lp:sysbench .

This is set of LUA scripts for sysbench 0.5 ( it supports scripting), and it works following way:

- you should use --test=tests/db/oltp.lua to run OLTP test
i.e. prepare

./sysbench --test=tests/db/oltp.lua --oltp-tables-count=25 prepare

run:

./sysbench --test=tests/db/oltp.lua --oltp-tables-count=25 --num-threads=5 run

oltp.lua should understand most options that available for regular sysbench –test=oltp

there are couple other scripts, like
oltp_simple
select
insert
delete
update_index
update_non_index

to support different OLTP …

Percona Server 5.5.11-20.2 is now available for download, including an experimental build for MacOS. Released on April 28, 2011, it is the current stable release in the the 5.5 series.

New Features

1. HandlerSocket, a NoSQL plugin for MySQL, has been updated to the latest stable version as April 11th, 2011.
2. InnoDB fast index creation now works with mysqldump, ALTER TABLE and OPTIMIZE TABLE. (Alexey Kopytov)

Variable Changes

1. Variable innodb_extra_rsegments was removed because the equivalent, ‘innodb_rollback_segments’, has been implemented in MySQL 5.5. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)

Bug Fixes

1. …

Good news for all Percona Software users out there. There are more ways how you can get access to Percona Software. If you’re using Scalr (See also Scalr Project on Google Code) you might be interested in Percona Server roles support Scalr team has announced recently. If you’re Mac user and looking for complete development environment for PHP and MySQL you can check out MNPP which also includes lightweight Ngnix web server instead of Apache.

Now about any Open Source projects including or based on Percona Server or Xtrabackup ? Let us know !

Time for our weekly review of the news! The big news this week is that Percona XtraBackup is ready to try out on Windows. Otherwise, there’s just more steady progress.

One quick note, sort of a “to whom it may concern,” is that the proper trademarked names of our products include “Percona Server”, “Percona XtraDB”, and “Percona XtraBackup”. “XtraDB” and “XtraBackup” are also Percona trademarks, but the proper names of the products include “Percona” at the beginning. The word “xtrabackup” alone and lowercased is only proper when referring to the xtrabackup compiled C binary, e.g. in how-to documentation in a context that includes the whole product name. We are happy to grant written permission for appropriate use of the trademarks. We’re working on publishing an official trademark policy on our website.

• We continue progress towards our Percona Server 5.5 release.
• Percona XtraBackup …

There have been recent discussions about DROP TABLE performance in InnoDB. (You can refer to Peter’s post http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/02/03/performance-problem-with-innodb-and-drop-table/ and these bug reports: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=51325 and http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=56332.) It may not sound that serious, but if your workload often uses DROP TABLE and you have a big buffer pool, it may be a significant issue. This can get especially painful, as during this operation InnoDB holds the LOCK_open mutex, which prevents other queries from executing. So, this is a problem for a server with a large amount of memory, like the one we have in our lab: a …

Last week wasn’t so active in terms of new development, because many of us were at the MySQL conference, of course. However, we did push out the XtraBackup 1.6 release, and began work on backporting some features from MySQL 5.6 to 5.1 for a certain large customer. Several of the features we’ve added in 5.0 and 5.1 are reimplemented in MySQL 5.6, which is great. It means that we can backport Oracle’s code and we don’t have to maintain these features ourselves anymore.

The MySQL conference, and to some extent the Collaborate conference, was a great meeting for a lot of developers. Many meetings had attendees from Oracle, Percona, MariaDB, and Drizzle developers. Some events had participation from senior management in the various companies. There were also a lot of productive meetings with large customers who use MySQL. I take these all together as a sign that the pace of MySQL development could continue to accelerate in the future. …

Percona Server version 5.1.56-12.7 is now available for download. It is based on MySQL 5.1.56 and is the current stable release in the 5.1 series.

New Features

• Expanded the applicability of InnoDB fast index creation to mysqldump, ALTER TABLE and, OPTIMIZE TABLE. (Alexey Kopytov)

Variables Changed

• Variable innodb_stats_method has been implemented in the upstream InnoDB, with the same name and functionality that had previously existed only in XtraDB. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)

Other Changes

• Implemented support for variable innodb_stats_method being implemented in the upstream InnoDB, including adding a column to table INNODB_SYS_STATS. Bug fixed: #733317. (Yasufumi Kinoshita) …

Percona XtraBackup 1.6 is now available for download and is the current stable release version of XtraBackup.

Options Added

• Added option --extra-lsndir to innobackupex. When specified for the backup phase, the option is passed to xtrabackup, and lsn information is stored with the file in the specified directory. This is needed so that lsn information is preserved during stream backup. (Vadim Tkachenko)
• Added option --incremental-lsn to innobackupex. If specified, this option is passed directly to the xtrabackup script and --incremental-basedir is ignored. (Vadim Tkachenko)
• Added option --incremental-dir to innobackupex. This option is passed directly to the xtrabackup binary. (Vadim Tkachenko)
• Added option --safe-slave-backupto innobackupex. (Daniel Nichter)
• Added option --safe-slave-backup-timeout to innobackupex. (Daniel Nichter)

Other Changes

…