The pt-query-digest is my go-to tool in order to perform slow query analysis, improve query performance and thus overall MySQL performance. In this blog post, I’m going to highlight the…

The post How to filter MySQL slow queries using pt-query-digest first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

A friend needed to analyze slow queries and for that he decides to use pt-query-digest tool. Though he got stuck at exporting slow queries from slow logs in RDS for…

The post MySQL Slow query log export and review in RDS first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

This post was originally published in October 2018 and was updated in March 2023.

pt-query-digest is one of the most commonly used tools for query auditing in MySQL. By default, pt-query-digest reports the top ten queries consuming the most amount of time inside MySQL. A query that takes more time than the set threshold for completion is considered slow, but it’s not always true that tuning such queries makes them faster. Sometimes, when resources on the server are busy, it will impact every other operation on the server, and so will impact queries too. In such cases, you will see the proportion of slow queries going up. That can also include queries that work fine in general.

This article explains a small trick to identify such spots using pt-query-digest and the slow query log. pt-query-digest …

Whenever we do upgrades for our clients from one major version of MySQL to another we strongly recommend to test in two forms.

First, it would be a performance test between the old version and the new version to make sure there aren’t going to be any unexpected issues with the query processing rates. Secondly, do a functional test to ensure all queries that are running on the old version will not have syntactic errors or problems with reserved words in the new version that we’re upgrading to.

If a client doesn’t have an appropriate testing platform to perform these types of tests, we will leverage available tools to test to the best of our ability. More often than not this includes using pt-upgrade after capturing slow logs with …

I love graphs. They just make things easier when it comes to finding patterns. I also love visibility. Having the ability to known what is going on inside the database is priceless. How about having visibility of the slow queries execution time on a graph? Let’s do it.

We’ve already described how to get query digest using performance schema. Since the MySQL server is already doing the heavy lifting for you with little-to-no overhead, this information is available practically at will. So let’s make some graphs with that data.

To accomplish this I will use the well-known tool Graphite to store and render time-series data. For those who are not familiar with Graphite, it’s actually a 3-piece tool, consisting of:

• The …

I have heard this question quite often: “At busy times, our replicas start lagging quite frequently. We are using N schemas, so which performance boost could we expect from MySQL 5.6 parallel replication?” Here is a quick way to give you a rough estimate of the potential benefit.

General idea

In MySQL 5.6, parallelism is added at the schema level. So in theory, if you have N schemas and if you use N parallel threads, replication could be up to N times faster. This assumes at least 2 things:

• Replication throughput scales linearly with the number of parallel threads.
• Writes are evenly distributed across schemas.

Both assumptions are of course not realistic. But it is easy to know the distribution of writes, and that can already give you an idea about how much you could benefit from parallel replication.

Writes are stored in binary logs but it is much easier to work with the …

A few years back Deva wrote about how to use tcpdump on very busy hosts. That post sparked my interest about exploring how to measure the impact of tcpdump on very busy hosts. In this post, I wanted to highlight how much of an impact there really is and what options you have to make the query collection much more effective.

Some things you need to know:

• The test is a sysbench read-only workload, 8 tables, 8 threads, 1000000 rows each with 16G of buffer pool. Dataset fully in memory.
• sysbench is ran on the same host, on 1Gbps connection, sysbench can saturate the network and therefore affect my network test with netcat so I decided to run locally.
• There are 13 tests, 5 minutes each with 1 minute interval, varying on how the dump file is captured.
  • First one as …

Percona Toolkit is one of our most mature open source applications. Derived from Maatkit and Aspersa, Percona Toolkit has evolved significantly over the years. The software now contains 32 tools, over 4,000 tests, and has been downloaded over 250,000 times. Anyone who manages a database – from DBAs to system administrators to even software developers – benefits from Percona Toolkit’s ability to perform a variety of MySQL server and system tasks that are too difficult or complex to perform manually.

We continue to make Percona Toolkit better each month. Over the last 9 months alone Percona has had 6 releases and resolved nearly 50 issues.

…

Percona is pleased to announce the availability of Percona Toolkit 2.2.11.  Released on Sept. 25, Percona Toolkit is a collection of advanced command-line tools to perform a variety of MySQL server and system tasks that are too difficult or complex for DBAs to perform manually. Percona Toolkit, like all Percona software, is free and open source.

This release contains bug fixes for pt-query-digest, pt-mysql-summary, pt-stalk, as well as other tools and is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.2 series. Downloads are available here and from the  …

If you’ve used relational databases for more than ten minutes, I hope you’ve heard of slow queries. Those are those pesky little gremlins that are slowing down your startup, and preventing scalability you so desperately need. Luckily there’s a solution. What I’ve found is if I send a report to developers every week, it keeps […]