May 21, 2013

MySQL: what read_buffer_size value is optimal ?

The more I work with MySQL Performance Optimization and Optimization for other applications the better I understand I have to less believe in common sense or common sense of documentation writers and do more benchmarks and performance research. I just recently wrote about rather surprising results with sort performance and today I’ve discovered even read_buffer_size [...]

Read Buffers, mmap, malloc and MySQL Performance

Monty Taylor posted interesting investigation of the fact read_buffer_size variable affects connection speed. This is not something you would expect right ? me too. Not only global user data is expected to be cached on startup but even if it is not why would you do full table scan to fetch single user information ? [...]

Working with large data sets in MySQL

What does working with large data sets in mySQL teach you ? Of course you have to learn a lot about query optimization, art of building summary tables and tricks of executing queries exactly as you want. I already wrote about development and configuration side of the problem so I will not go to details [...]

To UUID or not to UUID ?

Brian recently posted an article comparing UUID and auto_increment primary keys, basically advertising to use UUID instead of primary keys. I wanted to clarify this a bit as I’ve seen it being problems in so many cases. First lets look at the benchmark – we do not have full schema specified in the article itself [...]

Long PRIMARY KEY for Innodb tables

I’ve written and spoke a lot about using short PRIMARY KEYs with Innodb tables due to the fact all other key will refer to the rows by primary key. I also recommended to use sequential primary keys so you do not end up having random primary key BTREE updates which can be very expensive. Today [...]

Using LVM for MySQL Backup and Replication Setup

If someone asks me about MySQL Backup advice my first question would be if they have LVM installed or have some systems with similar features set for other operation systems. Veritas File System can do it for Solaris. Most SAN systems would work as well. What is really needed is ability to create atomic snapshot [...]

Database problems in MySQL/PHP Applications

Article about database design problems is being discussed by Kristian. Both article itself and responce cause mixed feellings so I decided it is worth commenting: 1. Using mysql_* functions directly This is probably bad but I do not like solutions proposed by original article ether. PEAR is slow as well as other complex conectors. I [...]

Sysbench evaluation of iSCSI performance

Partha Dutta posted pretty interesting post about iSCSI vs SCSI performance using SysBench. This is nice to finally see some iSCSI benchmarks done with MySQL – something we were planning to do for a while but never ended up doing, mainly due to lack of hardware available for tests. It is also good to see [...]

Choosing proper innodb_log_file_size

If you’re doing significant amount of writes to Innodb tables decent size of innodb_log_file_size is important for MySQL Performance. However setting it too large will increase recovery time, so in case of MySQL crash or power failure it may take long time before MySQL Server is operational again. So how to find the optimal combination [...]

Why MySQL could be slow with large tables ?

If you’ve been reading enough database related forums, mailing lists or blogs you probably heard complains about MySQL being unable to handle more than 1.000.000 (or select any other number) rows by some of the users. On other hand it is well known with customers like Google, Yahoo, LiveJournal,Technocarati MySQL has installations with many billions [...]