I’ve been running a benchmark today on my old test box with conventional hard drives (no raid with BBU) and noticed something unusual in the CPU utilization statistics being reported.

The benchmark was run like this:

sysbench --num-threads=64 --max-requests=0 --max-time=600000 --report-interval=10 --test=oltp --db-driver=mysql --oltp-dist-type=special  --oltp-table-size=1000000   --mysql-user=root --mysql-password=password  run

Which means: create 64 threads and hammer the database with queries as quickly as possible. As the test was run on the localhost I would expect the benchmark to completely saturate the system – being either using CPU or being blocked on IO nature of this benchmark so it does not spend a lot on database locks, especially as this system has just 2 cores.

Looking at VMSTAT however I noticed this:

[root@smt1 mysql]# vmstat 10
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.37-35.1 on June 3rd, 2014 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.37, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.37-35.1 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the  …

Recently, I’ve had reason to poke at MySQL performance on some pretty cool hardware. Comparing MySQL 5.6 to MySQL 5.7 is a pretty interesting thing to do when you have many CPU cores.

The improvements to creating read views in InnoDB is absolutely huge for small statements with large concurrency – MySQL 5.7 completely removes this as a bottleneck – as much as doubling maximum SQL queries per second, which is a pretty impressive improvement.

I haven’t poked at the similar improvements in Percona Server on this hardware setup – so I can only really guess as to the performance characteristics of it… If comparing to older MySQL versions, Percona Server 5.5 is likely to outperform MySQL 5.5 thanks to this optimization.

But I have to say… MySQL 5.7 is impressive …

The recent WebScaleSQL announcement has made quite a splash in the MySQL community over the last few weeks, and with a good reason. The collaboration between the major MySQL-at-scale users to develop a single code branch that addresses the needs of, well, web scale, is going to benefit the whole community. But I feel that the majority of community opinions and comments to date have been based on the announcement itself and the organizational matters only. What we have been missing is an actual look at the code. What actual new features and bug-fixes are there? Let’s take a look.

At the same time, as Percona is also a developer of an enhanced MySQL replacement database server, it’s natural to …

Percona has developed an Audit Log feature that is now included in Percona Server since the recent 5.5 and 5.6 releases. This implementation is alternative to the MySQL Enterprise Audit Log Plugin: Percona re-implemented the Audit Plugin code as GPL as Oracle’s code was closed source. This post is a quick introduction to this plugin.

Installation
There are two ways to install the Percona MySQL Audit Plugin:

INSTALL PLUGIN audit_log SONAME 'audit_log.so';

or in my.cnf

[mysqld]
plugin-load="audit_log=audit_log.so"

Verify installation

mysql> SHOW PLUGINS\G
...
*************************** 38. row ***************************
  Name: …

Some of us Perconians are at OpenStack summit this week in Atlanta. Matt Griffin, our director of product management, tweeted about the turbo-hipster CI talk about their experience of ALTER TABLEs running faster on Percona Server. Oracle’s Morgan Tocker then tweeted in response, asking why this was the case. I decided that the simplest way to answer that was here in this post.

The reason for this is the …

We just released, as an open source release, our new percona-agent (https://github.com/percona/percona-agent), the agent to work with Percona Cloud Tools. This agent is written in Go.

I will give a webinar titled “Monitoring All MySQL Metrics with Percona Cloud Tools” on June 25 that will cover the new features in percona-agent and Percona Cloud Tools, where I will also explain how it works. You are welcome to register now and join me. …

There are a couple of posts about setting up Percona XtraDB Cluster on Vagrant and Percona Server on MySQL Sandbox – those are two of the top tools used by the Percona Support team for testing and bug processing among other things.

In this post, however, I will show you how to use Docker with Percona Server on Ubuntu 12.04.

As per Docker’s official site:

Docker is an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere.

Docker containers can encapsulate any payload, and will run …

The new Percona Server 5.5.37-35.0 and Percona Server 5.6.17-65.0-56, announced yesterday (May 6), both include the open source version of the MySQL Audit Plugin. The MySQL Audit Plugin is used to log all queries or connections (“audit” MySQL usage). Until yesterday’s release, the MySQL Audit Plugin was only available in MySQL Enterprise.

EDIT:  Just to be clear, this implementation is alternative to the MySQL …

Percona Server version 5.6.17-65.0

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.6.17-65.0 on May 6th, 2014. Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories.

Based on MySQL 5.6.17, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.6.17-65.0 is the current GA release in the Percona Server 5.6 series. All of Percona’s software is …