Here at the MySQL Performance Blog, we’ve been discussing the several new features that MySQL 5.6 brought: GTID-based replication, InnoDB Fulltext, Memcached integration, a more complete performance schema, online DDL and …

I had the chance to work on an interesting case last week, and I thought I’d share what I think is a little known goodie from Percona Toolkit for MySQL called pt-query-digest.

One customer was suffering from periods of high load on their database server, leading to degraded application performance, and sometimes even short moments of downtime. As usual with these cases, we set up pt-stalk to trigger a capture if Threads_running went above a known ‘good’ value for this workload, so we would have lots of diagnostics information to review even if we couldn’t be logged in to the server at the time the problem happened.

As I began reviewing …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo begins next Monday and runs April 22-25, 2013. Attendees will see great keynotes from leaders in the industry including representatives from Oracle, Amazon Web Services, HP, Continuent, and Percona. They can also participate in thought provoking Birds of a Feather sessions on Tuesday night and the Wednesday night Community Networking Reception will be fun and entertaining with the presentation of the Community Awards and the Lightning Talks.

If you cannot attend the entire Percona Live MySQL Conference but want to take advantage of the keynotes, BOFs, and Community Networking …

I didn’t have time to answer all of the questions during Wednesday’s MySQL webinar, “5 Percona Toolkit Tools That Could Save Your Day,” but as promised, here are all of the questions and my answers. (A recording is available here.)

Q: One of the links to download the Percona Toolkit for MySQL (percona.com/get/percona-toolkit.tgz) doesn’t work!

A: You’re right, I made a typo, the correct link is percona.com/get/percona-toolkit.tar.gz. The other links are correct.

Q: Can you run pt-query-digest on an output of the slow log on a Windows …

On April 3 at 10 a.m. PST, I’ll be giving a webinar titled “5 Percona Toolkit Tools for MySQL That Could Save Your Day.” In this presentation you’ll learn how to perform typical but challenging MySQL database administration tasks.

My focus will be on the following tools:

• pt-query-digest, to select the queries you should try to improve to get optimal response times
• pt-archiver, to efficiently purge purge data from huge tables
• pt-table-checksum/pt-table-sync, to check if data on replicas is in sync with data on the master
• pt-stalk, to gather data when performance problems happen randomly or are very short
• pt-online-schema-change, to run …

Facebook is a major user of MySQL and has pushed the performance limits of the technology. Their MySQL experts have deep, hands on knowledge of the technology. I’m pleased to welcome Mark Callaghan, Software Engineer for Database Infrastructure at Facebook, back again this year to the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo to share his expertise. Mark was a keynote speaker at last year’s conference and will appear this year with a group of Facebook MySQL experts:

• Domas …

Percona’s Kenny Gryp leads a recent MySQL workshop

Percona will be in Chicago and London the week of April 8th delivering two 2-day MySQL workshops. For our MPB readers, we are offering a 15% discount. Just use MPB15A when purchasing your tickets to one or both MySQL workshops.

• Scaling and Optimization for MySQL on Monday & Tuesday, April 8 & 9
  • This MySQL workshop will cover:
    • Apply architecture scaling strategies that make the most sense, including …

I’m pleased to announce that Oracle is sending some of their top technical people to speak at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. The conference takes place April 22-25, 2013 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and Hyatt Santa Clara.

Tomas Ulin, VP, MySQL Engineering for Oracle, will present an invited keynote talk on “Driving MySQL Innovation” during the Tuesday morning opening keynotes. With the recent release of MySQL 5.6, conference attendees will hear about the latest developments of this major MySQL release.

In addition to Tomas, Oracle MySQL technologists will also lead three breakout …

MySQL 5.6 was made generally available as a production-ready solution earlier this month. This release comes about 2 years after MySQL 5.5 was released, but MySQL 5.6 contains improvements started long before that – for example, work on the Innodb Full Text Search project was started over 6 years ago, in addition with many optimizer and replication features. We’re happy to congratulate MySQL development team at Oracle with making this release happen.

In this blog post, I will not go into a features overview of MySQL 5.6. You can check out Release Notes for a good overview as well as many blog posts and articles written on this matter. Instead, I will tell you what is the current state of things with MySQL 5.6 at …

Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit, Feb. 25-28, 9-11 a.m. PST

Next week I’m teaching an online Percona Training class, called Analyzing SQL Queries with Percona Toolkit.  This is a guided tour of best practices for pt-query-digest, the best tool for evaluating where your database response time is being spent.

This month we saw the GA release of MySQL 5.6, and I wanted to check if any improvement has been made to the slow query log in table format.  Users of some MySQL appliances like Amazon RDS must use table logs, since they can’t access the file-based logs on the server.

I read the logging …