This blog post discusses how you can protect your e-commerce database from a high traffic disaster.

Databases power today’s e-commerce. Whether it’s listing items on your site, contacting your distributor for inventory, tracking shipments, payments, or customer data, your database must be up, running, tuned and available for your business to be successful.

There is no time that this is more important than high-volume traffic days. There are specific events that occur throughout the year (such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Singles Day) that you know are going to put extra strain on your database environment. But these are the specific times that your database can’t go down – these are the days that can make or break your year!

So what can you do to guarantee that your database environment is up to the …

In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the MySQL Replication Troubleshooting webinar.

First, I want to thank everybody for attending the August 25 webinar. The recording and slides for the webinar are available here. Below is the list of your questions that I wasn’t able to answer during the webinar, with responses:

Q: Hi Sveta. One question: how is it possible to get N previous events using the SHOW BINLOG EVENTS command? For example, the position is 999 and I want to analyze the previous five events. Is it possible?

A: Not, there is no such option. You cannot get the previous five events using

SHOW BINLOG EVENTS

. …

In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the InnoDB Troubleshooting webinar.

First, I want to thank everybody for attending the August 11 webinar. The recording and slides for the webinar are available here. Below is the list of your questions that I wasn’t able to answer during the webinar, with responses:

Q: What’s a good speed for buffer pool speed/size for maximum query performance?

A: I am sorry, I don’t quite understand the question. InnoDB buffer pool is an in-memory buffer. In an ideal case, your whole active dataset (rows that are accessed by application regularly) should be in the buffer pool. There is a good …

Thank you for attending my 22nd July 2016 webinar titled “Top Most Overlooked MySQL Performance Optimizations“. In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for that webinar.

For hardware, which disk raid level do you suggest? Is raid5 suggested performance-wise and data-integrity-wise?
RAID 5 comes with high overhead, as each write turns into a sequence of four physical I/O operations, two reads and two writes. We know that RAID 5s have some write penalty, and it could affect the performance on spindle disks. In most cases, we advise using alternative RAID levels. Use RAID 5 when disk capacity is more important than performance (e.g., archive databases …

Join Sveta Smirnova Thursday, August 11 at 10 am PDT (UTC-7) for a webinar on InnoDB Troubleshooting.

InnoDB is one of the most popular database engines. This general-purpose storage engine is widely used, has been MySQL’s default engine since version 5.6, and holds MySQL system tables since 5.7. It is hard to find a MySQL installation that doesn’t have at least one InnoDB table.

InnoDB is not a simple engine. It has its own locks, transactions, log files, monitoring, options and more. It is also under active development. Some of the latest features introduced in 5.6 are read-only transactions and multiple buffer pools (which now can persist on the disk between restarts). In 5.7, InnoDB …

In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the “Introduction into storage engine troubleshooting” webinar.

First, I want to thank everybody for attending the July 14 webinar. The recording and slides for the webinar are available here. Below is the list of your questions that I wasn’t able to answer during the webinar, with responses:

Q: At which isolation level do 

pt-online-schema-change

 and 

pt-archive

  copy data from a table?

A: Both tools do not change the server’s default transaction isolation level. Use either

REPEATABLE READ

 or …

Join Brent Compton, Kyle Bader and Yves Trudeau on August 2, 2016 at 10 am PDT (UTC-7) for a MySQL and Ceph webinar.

Many operators select OpenStack as their control plane of choice for providing both internal and external IT services. The OpenStack user survey repeatedly shows Ceph as the dominant backend for providing persistent storage volumes through OpenStack Cinder. When building applications and repatriating old workloads, developers are discovering the need to provide OpenStack infrastructure database services. Given MySQL’s ubiquity, and it’s reliance on persistent storage, it is of utmost importance to understand how to achieve the performance demanded by today’s applications. Databases like MySQL can be incredibly IO …