Percona has a new Chief Operating Officer! It is Tom Basil, who was Employee #11 at MySQL and led the Support organization there for almost eight years. He was the founding Director of Support at MySQL, and built it into a team of about 60 people all across the world. Tom was legendary as a manager at MySQL, and we're really looking forward to his experience at Percona.

It sure is funny how things work out. When Peter and Vadim were at MySQL, Tom was their boss for 4 years. Now, Tom works for them! And Tom actively recruited me for a position at MySQL Support almost exactly a year ago, but I joined Percona instead. Perhaps we were meant to work together.

So, why did he resign from Sun/MySQL and come join us? In his own words, slightly paraphrased,

• Vision. Tom knows that we have replicated the vision of MySQL's own founders Monty and David, which was what drew him to work at MySQL in the first place. We're building our …

MySQL just released their new MySQL Query Analyzer (link to a trial), and recently wrote up an interview with Mark Matthews about it. If you haven’t read that article, go ahead and do it. I have not used this software, but I fully believe its functionality is quite nice.

But there is at least [...]

We made new binaries for MySQL 5.0.67 build 7 which include patches we recently announced.

The -percona release includes:

PLAIN TEXT CODE:

1. | innodb_check_defrag.patch                        | Session status to check fragmentation of the last InnoDB scan                            | 1.0     | Percona <info@percona.com>       | GPL     | The names are Innodb_scan_*                      …

Do you know that there are two limits about dirty (modified but not flushed to disk) blocks of InnoDB buffer pool? One is the limit of "amount". The other is the limit of "age".

-- limit of "amount" --

As you know, buffer pool of InnoDB works as write-back cache of its datafiles. If the buffer pool is filled by dirty blocks, InnoDB cannot allocate new blocks without flushing the dirty blocks and the performance would get worse. This is the limit of dirty block "amount". We can avoid this limit by setting 'innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct' smaller or setting the larger buffer pool size. We might be never at a loss about the limit.

The another limit we should understand is limit of dirty block "age".

-- limit of "age" --

As you know again, because InnoDB write the modifies of datafile to transaction log file synchronously, InnoDB is allowed to treat its buffer pool as write-back …

After some pause we are going to announce bunch of patches we made and ported for last period.

Ported patches (ported from Google V2 patch):

1. -

innodb_fsync_source.patch - Show information about callers of fsync, more info

1. -

innodb_io_tune.patch - Port of two patches InnodbIOTune and InnodbAsync, more info

1. -

…

Today was epoch day in American history. Maybe even most important day this year, but it's not what I'd like to write about here. What does it mean for US citizens and all other people around the world? We know, but what does it mean for us - IT professionals and/or internet portals serving news for end users?

Increased number of requests to webservers, high network utilization, and huge number of queries against your databases (while on duty last night, I saw customer servers handling 10 times larger traffic than usual)..

How to deal with it? How to prepare for such events?

In the moments like that, the most important thing is to assure the continuity and high efficiency.  How to accomplish it?

The best way is through preparation for the planned event.  From past experience, we know that during the ongoing event, it is often impossible …

I am happy to announce Yasufumi Kinoshita joins our team as Performance Engineer. Yasufumi is known as InnoDB hacking expert, and there is bunch of patches he made we include in our releases: innodb buffer pool scalability fix, innodb rw_lock fix, control InnoDB IO etc. Actually there is one more patch -
"adaptive flush" in InnoDB, which makes flushing process more uniform and predictable. Yasufumi will post about this patch soon.

Yasufumi also had talk on MySQL Conference & Expo 2007
InnoDB Performance Potential in High-end Environments

Yasufumi's primary tasks as you can guess will be InnoDB performance and scalability fixes, InnoDB improvements and related question, however we are not going to restrict his activity only to InnoDB area but for all MySQL related problems.

So expect more and better patches in …

There is patch from Google to improve SMP performance , but for some workloads it showed for us reverse scalability.
E.g. update_key benchmark from sysbench. There are also results with Yasufumi's rw_locks (http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=26442)

I guess many of you know us and so our company for MySQL related services. It is true this is majority of our business at this point but it is far from everything.

Our goal in reality is to help people to build and operate quality systems, typically web sites, which means we help customers with performance, scalability, high availability as the whole, not just MySQL related issues.

Indeed if you look at MySQL driven web site its properties will likely depend on a lot of factors - good web side configuration, which is about caching, proxying, using multiple data centers or CDN, serving static content reliably and efficiently. Then it comes to efficient web application architecture and code - being scalable, efficient, highly available, secure and fault tolerant. Caching in particular as memcache plays important role …

Although we haven't announced any new members in a while, the Percona team has continued to grow steadily behind the scenes. Our hiring policy is to have a few months' provisional period to ensure the absolute highest quality of service and consistency of results provided to our clients. Today I'm proud to officially welcome Ewen Fortune and Piotr Biel, who have been working with us for quite a few months.

Ewen Fortune joins us from Spain, where he lives with his family. Ewen is actually a native English speaker, but is fluent in written and spoken Spanish, of course. Ewen has been a consultant and contractor before joining Percona, and has many years of experience in Oracle, MySQL, Unix systems administration, programming, and networking. Ewen is an Oracle Database 10g Administrator Certified Professional (OCP), a Certified MySQL 5.0 DBA (CMDBA), and a Certified MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA (CMCDBA). Like all of our consultants, he also has some …