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] …

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 …

In this blog, I’ll look at how to use ClickHouse for parallel log processing.

Percona is seen primarily for our expertise in MySQL and MongoDB (at this time), but neither is quite suitable to perform heavy analytical workloads. There is a need to analyze data sets, and a very popular task is crunching log files. Below I’ll show how ClickHouse can be used to efficiently perform this task. ClickHouse is attractive because it has multi-core parallel query processing, and it can even execute a single query using multiple CPUs in the background.

I am going to check how ClickHouse utilizes multiple CPU cores and threads. I will use a server with two sockets, equipped with “Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v3 @ 2.00GHz” in each. That gives a total of 28 CPU cores / 56 CPU threads.

To analyze workload, I’ll use an Apache log file from one of Percona’s servers. …

In this post, we will discuss how to search code with the help of cscope. Let’s begin by checking its description and capabilities (quoting directly from http://cscope.sourceforge.net/):

Cscope is a developer’s tool for browsing source code.

• Allows searching code for:
  • all references to a symbol
  • global definitions
  • functions called by a function
  • functions calling a function
  • text string
  • regular expression pattern
  • a file
  • files including a file
• Curses based (text screen)
• An …

Join Percona’s CTO Vadim Tkachenko @VadimTk and Altinity’s Co-Founder, Alexander Zaitsev as they present Supercharge Your Analytics with ClickHouse on Thursday, September 14, 2017, at 10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT (UTC-7).

Reserve Your Spot

ClickHouse is a real-time analytical database system. Even though they’re only celebrating one year as open source software, it has already proved itself ready for serious …

In this post, we will discuss how to fix cardinality for InnoDB tables manually.

As a support engineer, I often see situations when the cardinality of a table is not correct. When InnoDB calculates the cardinality of an index, it does not scan the full table by default. Instead it looks at random pages, as determined by options innodb_stats_sample_pages, innodb_stats_transient_sample_pages and innodb_stats_persistent_sample_pages, or …

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

Percona Live Europe 2017 in Dublin

Have you registered for Percona Live Europe Dublin? We have announced some awesome keynotes, and our sponsor list is growing (and we’re always looking for more!).

There will also be a community dinner (Tuesday, September …

Join Percona’s Product Manager, Michael Coburn as he presents Using Percona Monitoring and Management to Troubleshoot MySQL Performance Issues on Thursday, September 7, 2017, at 10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT (UTC-7).

Reserve Your Spot

Successful applications often become limited by MySQL performance. Michael will show you how to get great MySQL performance using Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). There will be a demonstration of how to leverage the combination of the …