We’re told that foreign key constraints are the best way to enforce logical referential integrity (RI) in SQL, preventing rows from becoming orphaned. But then we learn that the enforcement of foreign keys incurs a significant performance overhead.1,2 MySQL allows us to set FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 to disable enforcement of RI when the overhead is too high. But [...]
Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance
November 13, 2011 By 7 Comments
When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]
This week’s TGIF Percona Live ticket giveaway
September 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
It’s Friday again (already?) and as usual, we have a free ticket for Percona Live London. This time Tokutek is doing the honors of running the contest and selecting the winner. Instructions for entering the contest are on their blog, at the top of my recent guest post about covering indexes.
MySQL data via a NoSQL solution, Free ticket to Percona Live London
September 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The much-anticipated ability to access MySQL data via a NoSQL solution has been realized. Using HandlerSocket, significant performance gains can be realized for certain workloads. Sound like something you are interested in? Join us for Percona Live London to hear Ryan Lowe, Percona’s Director of American Consulting speak on this subject. In Ryan’s session he [...]
How to debug long-running transactions in MySQL
March 8, 2011 By 6 Comments
Among the many things that can cause a “server stall” is a long-running transaction. If a transaction remains open for a very long time without committing, and has modified data, then other transactions could block and fail with a lock wait timeout. The problem is, it can be very difficult to find the offending code [...]
Advanced index analysis with mk-index-usage
November 11, 2010 By 2 Comments
The new release of Maatkit has a useful feature in mk-index-usage to help you determine how indexes are used in more flexible ways. The default report just prints out ALTER statements for removing unused indexes, which is nice, but it’s often helpful to ask more sophisticated questions about index usage. I’ll use this blog’s queries [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 3: Subqueries
October 25, 2010 By 21 Comments
This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in certain circumstances (links: part 1, 2). This post is about subqueries, which in some cases execute outside-in instead of inside-out as users expect.
How is join_buffer_size allocated?
July 5, 2010 By 9 Comments
When examining MySQL configuration, we quite often want to know how various buffer sizes are used. This matters because some buffers (sort_buffer_size for example) are allocated to their full size immediately as soon as they are needed, but others are effectively a “max size” and the corresponding buffers are allocated only as big as needed [...]
A micro-benchmark of stored routines in MySQL
August 16, 2009 By 7 Comments
Ever wondered how fast stored routines are in MySQL? I just ran a quick micro-benchmark to compare the speed of a stored function against a “roughly equivalent” subquery. The idea — and there may be shortcomings that are poisoning the results here, your comments welcome — is to see how fast the SQL procedure code [...]
Percona turns two today !
August 1, 2008 By 13 Comments
July 31st 2006 was my last day working for MySQL and August 1st I started what later was incorporated Percona with Vadim joining me September 1st as co-founder. Two years is a significant anniversary for any startup – surviving (and being profitable) for 2 years can be seen as validation of our business model and [...]
