Emphasis on clustering solutions comes up quite a lot when talking to customers about High Availability. The reason is because clustering is supposed to provide an easier solution for maintaining high availability and so that you do not have to rely on other tools and techniques outside of the database server. I thought it would be good to share the gist of many of my discussions around clustering, in the form of a blog post. So here I will be doing a high-level comparison between MySQL NDB Cluster and Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Each day there is probably work done to improve performance of the InnoDB storage engine and remove bottlenecks and scalability issues. Hence there was another one I wanted to highlight: Scalability issues due to tables without primary keys. This scalability issue is caused by the usage of tables without primary keys. This issue typically shows itself as contention on the InnoDB dict_sys mutex. Now the dict_sys mutex controls access to the data dictionary. This mutex is used at various important places throughout the InnoDB code and as such any contention on the dict_sys mutex is going to have a InnoDB system-wide negative affect.

While most of the talk recently has mostly been around the new changes in MySQL 5.6 (and that is understandable), I have had lately some very interesting cases to deal with, with respect to the Metadata Locking related changes that were introduced in MySQL 5.5.3. It appears that the implications of Metadata Locking have not been covered well, and since there are still a large number of MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 installations that would upgrade or are in the process of upgrading to MySQL 5.5, I thought it necessary to discuss what these implications exactly are.

Solid State Drive (SSD) have made it big and have made their way not only in desktop computing but also in mission-critical servers. SSDs have proved to be a break-through in IO performance and leave HDD far far behind in terms of Random IO performance. Random IO is what most of the database administrators would be concerned about as that is 90% of the IO pattern visible on database servers like MySQL. I have found Intel 520-series and Intel 910-series to be quite popular and they do give very good numbers in terms of Random IOPS. However, its not just performance that you should be concerned about, failure predictions and health gauges are also very important, as loss of data is a big NO-NO. There is a great deal of misconception about the endurance level of SSD, as its mostly compared to rotating disks even when measuring endurance levels, however, there is a big difference in how both SSD and HDD work, and that has a direct impact on the endurance level of SSD.

This is the third blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is targeted at the join related optimizations introduced in the optimizer. These optimizations are available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5, and MariaDB 5.5

I have written a second blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is aimed at the optimizer enhancement Multi Range Read (MRR). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5

I have been working with Peter in preparation for the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. We are taking a look at and benchmarking optimizer enhancements one by one. So in the same way this blog post is aimed at a new optimizer enhancement Index Condition Pushdown (ICP). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5

This guide will get you up and running with how to identify the bottleneck queries using the excellent tool pt-query-digest. You will learn how to use and analyze the output returned by pt-query-digest. You will also learn some differences between slow query logging in various MySQL versions. Later on in the post I will also show you how to make use of the extra diagnostic data available with Percona Server.

EC2 includes a security feature that allows you to define groups with a set of firewall rules to restrict access. These groups are called security groups. This post deals with understanding how the security groups work and how to use them to restrict access based on IP as well as roles.

The slides of my talk on B+Tree Indexes and InnoDB are now available for download. This slide was presented during Percona Live London 2011. You can download the slides from here.
There are many other interesting and informative talks that were presented during Percona Live London 2011, and I think you should definitely check them out, if you haven’t. They are available here.