May 23, 2013

Innodb undo segment size and transaction isolation

You might know if you have long running transactions you’re risking having a lot of “garbage” accumulated in undo segment size which can cause performance degradation as well as increased disk space usage. Long transactions can also be bad for other reasons such as taking row level locks which will prevent other transactions for execution, [...]

Data Corruption, DRBD and story of bug

Working with customer, I faced pretty nasty bug, which is actually not rare situation , but in this particular there are some lessons I would like to share. The case is pretty much described in bug 55981, or in pastebin. Everything below is related to InnoDB-plugin/XtraDB, but not to regular InnoDB ( i.e in MySQL [...]

Percona Server 5.1.50-rel12.1

Dear Community, Percona Server version 5.1.50-rel12.1 RC is now available for download. Functionality Added or Changed Percona Server 5.1.50-rel12.1 is now based on MySQL 5.1.50. New Features Added: innodb_lru_dump_restore – Implemented automatic dumping of the buffer pool at specified intervals. innodb_buffer_pool_shm – Implemented option ”innodb_buffer_pool_shm_checksum”; when enabled, shared memory buffer pool is checksum validated. This [...]

Recover BLOB fields

For a long time long types like BLOB, TEXT were not supported by Percona InnoDB Recovery Tool. The reason consists in a special way InnoDB stores BLOBs. An InnoDB table is stored in a clustered index called PRIMARY. It must exist even if a user hasn’t defined the primary index. The PRIMARY index pages are [...]

Blob Storage in Innodb

I’m running in this misconception second time in a week or so, so it is time to blog about it. How blobs are stored in Innodb ? This depends on 3 factors. Blob size; Full row size and Innodb row format. But before we look into how BLOBs are really stored lets see what misconception [...]

When should you store serialized objects in the database?

A while back Friendfeed posted a blog post explaining how they changed from storing data in MySQL columns to serializing data and just storing it inside TEXT/BLOB columns. It seems that since then, the technique has gotten more popular with Ruby gems now around to do this for you automatically.

How number of columns affects performance ?

It is pretty understood the tables which have long rows tend to be slower than tables with short rows. I was interested to check if the row length is the only thing what matters or if number of columns we have to work with also have an important role. I was interested in peak row [...]

Friday challenge: ibd recovery

I want to make this Friday a bit more interesting – how do you feel to train a bit in InnoDB data recovery techniques. I have .ibd datafile which was created by query CREATE TABLE `tryme` ( `email` mediumblob, `content` mediumblob ) ENGINE=InnoDB … (SOME PARAMETERS SKIPPED) …; and I inserted one record into this [...]

Should you move from MyISAM to Innodb ?

There is significant portion of customers which are still using MyISAM when they come to us, so one of the big questions is when it is feasible to move to Innodb and when staying on MyISAM is preferred ? I generally prefer to see Innodb as the main storage engine because it makes life much [...]

Quickly preloading Innodb tables in the buffer pool

In the previous post I mentioned a way I use to preload Clustered Index (data) for Innodb tables. Though I thought this topic would benefit from a bit more information. But lest first start with feature request for Innodb Team: All ways I mention here are hacks and they can’t be as efficient as native [...]