The MySQL Performance Schema exposes so much data that it’s not trivial to learn, configure, and use. With recently released Percona Agent 1.0.11 you can get query metrics – like min, max, and average query execution time – with a few clicks:

Click “Apply” and about two minutes later you’ll have query metrics from Performance Schema, collected and sent every minute.

Percona Cloud Tools (PCT) and Percona Agent handle all the details. You’ll need MySQL (or Percona Server) 5.6 and Percona Agent 1.0.11 or newer. One caveat at the moment: it …

I’m happy to announce Go packages for MySQL. Particularly exciting is a new query fingerprint function which is very fast and efficient, but I’ll talk about that later. First, go-mysql is currently three simple Go packages for parsing and aggregating MySQL slow logs. If you’ve been following Percona development, you’ve no doubt heard of Percona Cloud Tools (PCT), a somewhat new performance management web service for MySQL.

One tool in PCT is “Query Analytics” which continuously analyzes query metrics from the slow log. The slow log provides the most metrics and therefore the most performance insight into MySQL. percona-agent, the open-source agent for PCT, uses …

For months when speaking with customers I have been positioning Percona Cloud Tools (PCT) as a valuable tool for the DBA/Developer/SysAdmin but only recently have I truly been able to harness the data and make a technical recommendation to a customer that I feel would have been very difficult to accomplish otherwise.

Let me provide some background: I was tasked with performing a Performance Audit for one of our customers (Performance Audits are extremely popular as they allow you to have a MySQL Expert confirm or reveal challenges within your MySQL environment and make your database run faster!) and as part of our …

If you’ve been studying complex systems you know what minor changes might cause consequences of much greater proportions, sometimes causing some effects that are not easily explained at first. I recently ran across a great illustration of such behavior while doing MySQL benchmarks which I thought would be interesting to share.

I’m using a very simple benchmark – Sysbench 0.5 on Percona Server 5.6.21-70.1 just running update queries:

sysbench  --num-threads=64 --report-interval=10 --max-time=0 --max-requests=0 --rand-type=pareto --oltp-table-size=1000000000 --mysql-user=root --mysql-password= --mysql-db=sbinnodb  --test=/usr/share/doc/sysbench/tests/db/update_index.lua run

Some people frown upon such benchmarks due to their triviality and being irrelevant to workloads. I like them because they often allow you to study already complex system behavior in a much more controlled environment than “real” workloads – and so …

Introducing Consul

I’m always interested in what Mitchell Hashimoto and Hashicorp are up to, I typically find their projects valuable.  If you’ve heard of Vagrant, you know their work.

I recently became interested in a newer project they have called ‘Consul‘.  Consul is a bit hard to describe.  It is (in part):

• Highly consistent metadata store (a bit like Zookeeeper)
• A monitoring system (lightweight Nagios)
• A service discovery system, both DNS and HTTP-based. (think of something like haproxy, but instead of tcp load balancing, it provides dns lookups with healthy services)

What this has to do with Percona XtraDB Cluster

I’ve had some more complex testing for  …

This post is a follow-up to my November 19 webinar, “Tips from the Trenches: A Guide to Preventing Downtime for the Over-Extended DBA,” during which I described some of the most common reasons DBAs experience avoidable downtime. The session was aimed at the “over-stretched DBA,” identified as the MySQL DBA short of time or an engineer of another discipline without the depth of the MySQL system. The over-stretched DBA may be prone to making fundamental mistakes that cause downtime through poor response time, operations that cause blocking on important data or administrative mishaps through the lack of best practice monitoring and alerting. (You can download my slides and view the recorded webinar here.)

Monitor the things
One of the aides to keeping the system up and …

In many write-intensive workloads Innodb/XtraDB storage engines you may see hidden and dangerous “debt” being accumulated – unpurged transaction “history” which if not kept in check over time will cause serve performance regression or will take all free space and cause an outage. Let’s talk about where it comes from and what can you do to avoid running into the trouble.

Technical Background: InnoDB is an MVCC engine which means it keeps multiple versions of the rows in the database, and when rows are deleted or updated they are not immediately removed from the database but kept for some time – until they can be removed. For a majority of OLTP workloads they can be removed seconds after the change actually took place. In some cases though they might need to be kept for a long period of time – if there are some old transactions running in the system that might still need to look at an old database state. As of …

I was talking with a Percona Support customer earlier this week who was looking for Galera data on Percona Cloud Tools. (Percona Cloud Tools, now in free beta, is a hosted service providing access to query performance insights for all MySQL uses.)

The customer mentioned they were already keeping track of some Galera stats on Cacti, and given they were inclined to use Percona Cloud Tools more and more, they wanted to know if it was already supporting Percona XtraDB Cluster. My answer was: “No, not yet: you can install agents in each node (the regular way in the first node, then …

I was talking with a Percona Support customer earlier this week who was looking for Galera data on Percona Cloud Tools. (Percona Cloud Tools, now in free beta, is a hosted service providing access to query performance insights for all MySQL uses.)

The customer mentioned they were already keeping track of some Galera stats on Cacti, and given they were inclined to use Percona Cloud Tools more and more, they wanted to know if it was already supporting Percona XtraDB Cluster. My answer was: “No, not yet: you can install agents in each node (the regular way in the first node, then …

OpenStack Trove Day

I just returned from a week in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I was attending the OpenStack Trove Day and the Trove mid-cycle meetup, both sponsored by the great folks at Tesora.

I am relatively new to the OpenStack and Trove arenas so this was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn more about the communities, the various components within OpenStack, and what part Trove plays. I found the entire event very worthwhile – I met a lot of key people in the community, learned more about Trove and its potential, and in general felt a great energy and excitement surrounding Trove and OpenStack as a whole.

There were more than 120 attendees at Trove Day. That is almost four times the initial estimate! I …