The latest from the MySQL community

Focusing on Percona Server 8.4.11-11

My previous post (Performance Progression of Percona Server for MySQL 8.4) did a brief review of the performance changes in Percona Server for MySQL 8.4 released in 2026. I recommend reading it first to better understand the material in this post.

Version 8.4.11-11 includes patches that deliver significant improvements in performance and scalability.

One of the most impressive illustrations of the performance bump is reflected in the following graph:

Graph 1 – Percona-Server 8.4.X with 8G buffer  [ INTERACTIVE GRAPH ][ …

1. Purpose and scope

This performance investigation aims to look into the read/write performance of Percona Server for MySQL 8.4 and how it changed between versions released in 2026:

• 8.4.8-8 released on 12 March 2026
• 8.4.10-10 released on 30 June 2026
• 8.4.11-11 released on 20 August 2026

We want to see if there are improvements in scalability and performance in OLTP read/write operations, where the improvements are most noticeable and how they were achieved. For some readers this material might help with making the decision whether upgrading to a newer version is worth the effort.

An important note is that the new features or security patches will not be taken into consideration.

Measuring Latency (Percentiles) and Resource Utilization (CPU, RAM, I/O) is not in the scope of this post.

2. Configuration and Methodology

The …

Benchmarking MyRocks vs. InnoDB in Memory-Constrained Environments It is a well-known fact in the database world that InnoDB is incredibly fast when the entire database fits into memory. But what happens when your data grows beyond your available RAM? MyRocks, built on RocksDB, is frequently recommended as a superior choice for environments constrained by memory, […]

When I’m working with MySQL, I care not just about whether a single query is slow, but how much total load the server can handle before performance starts to drop.

Tools like mysqlslap help by generating synthetic workloads to simulate multiple clients and measure the server’s Queries Per Second (QPS).

In this post, I’ll walk through a script I used to benchmark MySQL server performance with mysqlslap, and discuss when it makes sense to use it over more advanced tools like sysbench. I originally used this script in a blog post published at ReadySet: Vertical Scaling of MySQL vs. Horizontal Scaling with ReadySet.

Why Benchmark a MySQL Server?

Benchmarking gives a rough idea of how a MySQL server performs under …

In this blog, I will cover important aspects which you need to test when benchmarking replication setup. MySQL has great tools that could be used to test its performance. They include:

sysbench – https://github.com/akopytov/sysbench

BMK-kit – http://dimitrik.free.fr/blog/posts/mysql-perf-bmk-kit.html

mysqlslap – https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysqlslap.html

LinkBench – https://github.com/facebookarchive/linkbench

I will not describe how to use them here, as you can find instructions on the provided links or in the Percona blog by browsing tags …

Benchmarking is a critical technique for delivering high performance software. The basic idea behind benchmarking is measuring and comparing the performance of one software version against another. Over the years, many benchmarking techniques have emerged, but we can broadly separate them into two categories: micro and macro benchmarks. Micro-benchmarks measure a small part of the codebase, usually by isolating a single function call and calling it repeatedly, whereas macro-benchmarks measure the performance of the codebase as a whole and run in an environment similar to what end-users experience.

More and more people are nowadays thinking of cloud migration. The question of “Which cloud provider performs better for my MySQL workload?” is really common but cannot always be easily answered. However, there are ways to come up with an answer. This question also applies when thinking of moving to any provider, not necessarily a cloud one or DBaaS.

The Problem

The most reliable conclusion can be found if you have a testing environment that is fully identical and can produce the same amount of traffic compared to your production version. In this case, the comparison should be straightforward as what you have to do is point your testing environment against the under-evaluation (cloud) providers, and evaluate the differences in performance. But this is not always easy, as many organizations do not have such environments or it’s not always possible to replay all traffic.

The Idea

In this …

In this blog post I’ll look at the performance of Percona XtraDB Cluster on AWS using different service instances, and recommend some best practices for maximizing performance.

You can use Percona XtraDB Cluster in AWS environments. We often get questions about how best to deploy it, and how to optimize both performance and spend when doing so. I decided to look into it with some benchmark testing.

For these benchmark tests, I used the following configuration:

• Region:
  • Availability zones: US East – 1, zones: b, c, d
  • Sysbench 1.0.8
  • ProxySQL 1.4.3
  • 10 tables, 40mln records – ~95GB dataset
  • Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.18
  • Amazon Linux AMI

We …

In this blog post, I will run a gh-ost benchmark against the performance of pt-online-schema-change.

When gh-ost came out, I was very excited. As MySQL ROW replication became commonplace, you could use it to track changes instead of triggers. This practice is cleaner and safer compared to Percona Toolkit’s pt-online-schema-change. Since gh-ost doesn’t need triggers, I assumed it would generate lower overhead and work faster. I frequently called it “pt-online-schema-change on steroids” in my talks. …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how ClickHouse performs in a general analytical workload using the star schema benchmark test.

We have mentioned ClickHouse in some recent posts (ClickHouse: New Open Source Columnar Database, Column Store Database Benchmarks: MariaDB ColumnStore vs. Clickhouse vs. Apache Spark), where it showed excellent results. ClickHouse by itself seems to be event-oriented RDBMS, as its name suggests (clicks). Its primary purpose, using Yandex Metrica (the system similar to Google Analytics), also points to an event-based nature. We also can see there is …