Replaying database load with Percona Playback

If you are planning to upgrade or make any configuration change on your MySQL database the first advice usually is:

- Benchmark!

How should we do that benchmark? People usually run generic benchmark tools like sysbench, tpcc or mysqlslap that are good to know the number of transactions per seconds that a database can do but it doesn’t care about your workload, data set or queries. Those tools just run random queries against random generated data.