It’s not essential to understand how MySQL® and Percona Server for MySQL build indexes. However, if you have an understanding of the processing, it could help when you want to reserve an appropriate amount of space for data inserts. From MySQL 5.7, developers changed the way they built secondary indexes for InnoDB, applying a bottom-up rather than the top-down approach used in earlier releases. In this post, I’ll walk through an example to show how an InnoDB index is built. At the end, I’ll explain how you can use this understanding to set an appropriate value for innodb_fill_factor.

Index building process

To build an index on a table with existing data, there are the following phases in InnoDB

1. Read phase (read from clustered index and build secondary index entries)
2. Merge sort phase
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Sysbench has long been established as the de facto standard when it comes to benchmarking MySQL performance. Percona relies on it daily, and even Oracle uses it when blogging about new features in MySQL 8. Sysbench comes with several pre-defined benchmarking tests. These tests are written in an easy-to-understand scripting language called Lua. Some of these tests are called: oltp_read_write, oltp_point_select, tpcc, oltp_insert. There are over ten such scripts to emulate various behaviors found in standard OLTP applications.

But what if your application does not fit the pattern of traditional OLTP? How can you continue to utilize the power of load-testing, benchmarking, …

Please join Percona’s Chief Technology Officer, Vadim Tkachenko, as he presents How to Rock with MyRocks on Thursday, January 17th at 10:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 1:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

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MyRocks is a new storage engine from Facebook and is available in Percona Server for MySQL. In what cases will you want to use it? We will check different workloads and when MyRocks is most suitable for you. Also, as for any new engine, it’s important to set it up and tune it properly. So, we will review the most important settings to pay attention to.

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Please join Percona’s MySQL Product Manager, Tyler Duzan as he presents Walkthrough of Percona Server MySQL 8.0 on Wednesday, January 9th at 11:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 2:00 PM (UTC-4).

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Our Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 software is the company’s free, enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL Community Edition. The software includes all of the great features in MySQL Community Edition 8.0. Additionally, it includes enterprise-class features from Percona made available free and open source. …

Please join Percona’s CEO Peter Zaitsev as he presents MySQL 8 for Developers on Wednesday, December 12th, 2018 at 11:00 AM PST (UTC-7) / 2:00 PM EST (UTC-5).

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There are many great new features in MySQL 8, but how exactly can they help your application? This session takes a practical look at MySQL 8 features. It also details which limitations of previous MySQL versions are overcome by MySQL 8. Lastly, what you can do with MySQL 8 that you could not have done before is discussed.

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Working on a test case with sysbench, I encountered this:

mysql> select * from sbtest1 where id = round(rand()*10000, 0);
+------+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| id   | k      | c                                                                                                                       | pad                                                         |
+------+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|  179 | 499871 | 09833083632-34593445843-98203182724-77632394229-31240034691-22855093589-98577647071-95962909368-34814236148-76937610370 | 62233363025-41327474153-95482195752-11204169522-13131828192 |
| 1606 | 502031 | …

Continuing on the series of blog posts about MySQL High Availability, today we will talk about stale reads and how to overcome this issue.

The Problem

Stale reads is a read operation that fetches an incorrect value from a source that has not synchronized an update operation to the value (source Wiktionary).

A practical scenario is when your application applies INSERT or UPDATE data to your master/writer node, and has to read it immediately after. If this particular read is served from another server in the replication/cluster topology, the data is either not there yet (in case of an INSERT) or it still provides the old value (in case of an UPDATE).

If your application or part of your application …

Percona released a Release Candidate (RC) version of Percona Server for MySQL 8.0, the company’s free, enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL Community Edition. Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 includes all the features of MySQL Community Edition 8.0, along with enterprise-class features from Percona that make it ideal for enterprise production environments. The latest release offers increased reliability, performance and security.

Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 General Availability (GA) will be available later this year. You learn how to install the release candidate software here. Please …

Recently we had a customer that had issues with a filled disk on the server hosting their Docker pmm-server environment. They were not able to access the web UI, or even stop the pmm-server container because they had filled the /var/ mount point.

Setting correct expectations

The best way to avoid these kinds of issues in the first place is to plan ahead, and to know exactly with what you are dealing with in terms of disk space requirements. Michael Coburn has written a great blogpost on this matter:

https://www.percona.com/blog/2017/05/04/how-much-disk-space-should-i-allocate-for-percona-monitoring-and-management/

We are now using …

With the exception of the three configuration variables described here, ProxySQL will only parse the configuration files the first time it is started, or if the proxysql.db file is missing for some other reason.

If we want to change any of this data we need to do so via ProxySQL’s admin interface and then save them to disk. That’s fine if ProxySQL is running, but what if it won’t start because of these values?

For example, perhaps we accidentally configured ProxySQL to run on port 3306 and restarted it, but there’s already a production MySQL instance running on this port. ProxySQL won’t start, so we can’t edit the value that way:

2018-10-02 09:18:33 network.cpp:53:listen_on_port(): [ERROR] bind(): Address already in use

We could delete proxysql.db and have it reload the configuration files, but …