Top all-time · #123
Percona
Company blog · percona.com/blogdatasystems
Percona is the company blog at percona.com, writing about data and systems. Since 2008, 337 different Hacker News readers have linked it 611 times, most often “UUIDs are popular, but bad for performance (2019)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Percona's blog and docs on database performance, tuning and internals for MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, plus its tools like Percona Toolkit and XtraBackup. Also cited for Aurora and UUID-key comparisons.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Enterprise-class open source database software, support and services for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis and MariaDB.
Most-linked posts?
- UUIDs are popular, but bad for performance (2019)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-07-16
- /doc/percona-toolkit/3.0/pt-online-schema-change.html6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-03-27
- /doc/percona-toolkit/2.1/pt-online-schema-change.html5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-09-01
- /doc/percona-toolkit/2.1/pt-online-schema-change.html5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-08-16
- /about-percona/careers4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-11-01
- /software/database-tools/percona-monitoring-and-management4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-12-21
- Automatic Index Recommendations in PostgreSQL Using Pg_qualstats and Hypopg4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-07-22
- /doc/percona-toolkit/LATEST/pt-online-schema-change.html4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-03-24
- /blog/2014/12/19/store-uuid-optimized-way/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-11-30
- /blog/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-08-18
What Hacker News says?
It looks like Percona has partial support for PostgreSQL. It's not as detailed as MySQL. https://www.percona.com/software/database-tools/percona-moni...
Comment linking /software/database-tools/percona-monitoring-and-management
on “Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres”Submitted UUIDs are popular, but bad for performance (2019) as a story · 256 points
HN discussionAll the Percona tool are for MySQL and there is nothing comparable for PG afaik. https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-monitoring-and-managemen... https://www.percona.com/software/database-tools/percona-tool...
Comment linking /software/database-tools/percona-toolkit
on “Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres”Submitted PostgreSQL on ARM-Based AWS EC2 Instances as a story · 208 points
HN discussionI believe you're thinking of Uber: https://www.percona.com/live/plam16/sessions/relational-data...
Comment linking /live/plam16/sessions/relational-databases-uber-mysql-postgres
on “Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres”Submitted MySQL Challenge: 100k Connections as a story · 200 points
HN discussionFor MySQL there is xtrabackup - https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-database/percona-xtra... .
Comment linking /software/mysql-database/percona-xtrabackup
on “Use one big server”Submitted Parallelism in PostgreSQL as a story · 173 points
HN discussionAnything non-k-sortable in a B[+,-]tree will cause a ton of page splits. This is a more noticeable performance impact in RDBMS with a clustered index (MySQL's InnoDB, MS SQL Server) [0], but it also impacts Postgres [1] in multiple [2] ways. [0]: https://www.percona.com/blog/uuids-are-popular-but-bad-for-p... [1]: https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/unexpected-downsides-... [2]: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blo…
Comment linking /blog/uuids-are-popular-but-bad-for-performance-lets-discuss/
on “Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret”Submitted About ZFS Performance as a story · 165 points
HN discussion> GP3... as well as 4 volume striping For MySQL and Postgres, RDS stripes across four volumes once you hit 400 GiB. Doesn't matter the type. The latency variation on gp3 is abysmal [0], and the average [1] isn't great either. It's probably fine if you have low demands, or if your working set fits into memory and you can risk the performance hit when you get an uncached query. 12K IOPS sounds nice until you add laten…
Comment linking /blog/performance-of-various-ebs-storage-types-in-aws/
on “Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret”Submitted ZFS from a MySQL perspective as a story · 161 points
HN discussionI'm curious about how you have MySQL configured. If the query cache is enabled you will see MySQL plateau. There's also the all important innodb_buffer_pool_size and innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit. See this for more info https://www.percona.com/blog/2013/09/20/innodb-performance-o...
Comment linking /blog/2013/09/20/innodb-performance-optimization-basics-updated/
on “Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service”Submitted MySQL vs. MariaDB: Reality Check as a story · 161 points
HN discussionNot it was not the case and there was several serious issues with fsync and PG in the past: https://www.percona.com/blog/2019/02/22/postgresql-fsync-fai... On MySQL: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/innodb-dedicated-ser... InnoDB uses O_DIRECT during flushing I/O, but skips the fsync() system call after each write operation. The fsync thing is more complex than it looks like.
Comment linking /blog/2019/02/22/postgresql-fsync-failure-fixed-minor-versions-released-feb-14-2019/
on “Jepsen Disputes MongoDB's Data Consistency Claims”Submitted PostgreSQL 15: Stats Collector Gone? What’s New? as a story · 153 points
HN discussionI remember that Richard Hipp (SQLite creator) once cited a bunch of similar quotes including the Linus' one. https://www.percona.com/sites/default/files/hipp%20sqlite%20... "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, pp. 102-103
Comment linking /sites/default/files/hipp%20sqlite%20percona-raleigh-20150212.pdf
on “Linus Torvalds: Git proved I could be more than a one-hit wonder”Submitted Linux Fsync Issue for Buffered IO and Its Preliminary Fix for PostgreSQL as a story · 137 points
HN discussionIs there an equivalent to the MySQL handlersocket stuff in postgresql? http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.5/performance/ha... http://www.slideshare.net/akirahiguchi/handlersocket-2010062... It might go against the "no transaction" crowd, but seems useful for performance-critical needs. I'm scheduling a bit of testing time with it next week to see if it's something I'd roll out in production (Maria 10 system)
Comment linking /doc/percona-server/5.5/performance/handlersocket.html
on “PostgreSQL 9.4 Released”Submitted Pg_stat_monitor – better insights into query performance in PostgreSQL as a story · 134 points
HN discussionPersonally I prefer Postgres. But at the shop we use MySQL. One of the leads personally believe in Percona Server[0] and mentions some of the old mysql folks work there. I like their docs and the idea of a more tuned mysql config. [0]: https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.7/index.html
Comment linking /doc/percona-server/5.7/index.html
on “Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL”Submitted A Look at MyRocks Performance as a story · 134 points
HN discussionPercona to the rescue [1]. Works flawlessly, at least in our case. [1] https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/2.1/pt-online-sc...
Comment linking /doc/percona-toolkit/2.1/pt-online-schema-change.html
on “Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL”Submitted AMD EPYC Performance Testing with systemd as a story · 120 points
HN discussionTools such as the percona toolkit ( https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-tools/percona-toolkit ) provide the ability to perform safe and performant online alters for MySQL. Behind the scenes it actually creates a new table with the new schema and utilizes triggers to apply writes to the new table as the original data is being copied. Once it completes the table is renamed and the triggers are removed. Percona also…
Comment linking /software/mysql-tools/percona-toolkit
on “Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL”Submitted Hypothetical Indexes in PostgreSQL as a story · 98 points
HN discussionFalse. > But it does not seperate table data into one file per table That's because if you didn't have it set when creating the database, it won't move data to the new fs layout when you set the setting on, without an OPTIMIZE. If you had it on from the beginning, table data is per file. I literally just did an ls on my /va/lib/mysql and there's a folder per database, in which there are 2 files per table (.frm and .…
Comment linking /blog/2013/08/20/why-is-the-ibdata1-file-continuously-growing-in-mysql/
on “The Linux kernel's inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure”Submitted Handling Null Values in Postgres as a story · 92 points
HN discussionSmyte (YC W15) | San Francisco, CA | Full time | Onsite | https://www.smyte.com/ We're primarily looking for a quality devops/infra/sre engineer, but we're also interested in anyone fullstack on frontend. Check out our "jobs repo" here: https://github.com/smyte/careers Why Smyte? * We've built a platform to stop the victimization of innocent people online. We successfully stop scams, harassment, fraud, account takeo…
Comment linking /live/17/sessions/smytedb-poor-mans-distributed-database-built-kafka-and-rocksdb
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2017)”Submitted Percona acquires Tokutek as a story · 77 points
HN discussion
