May 25, 2013

Avoiding auto-increment holes on InnoDB with INSERT IGNORE

Are you using InnoDB tables on MySQL version 5.1.22 or newer? If so, you probably have gaps in your auto-increment columns. A simple INSERT IGNORE query creates gaps for every ignored insert, but this is undocumented behaviour. This documentation bug is already submitted. Firstly, we will start with a simple question. Why do we have [...]

Fishing with dynamite, brought to you by the randgen and dbqp

I tend to speak highly of the random query generator as a testing tool and thought I would share a story that shows how it can really shine. At our recent dev team meeting, we spent approximately 30 minutes of hack time to produce test cases for 3 rather hard to duplicate bugs. Of course, [...]

Introducing our Percona Live speakers

We have mostly finalized the Percona Live schedule at this point, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to introduce who’s going to be speaking and what they’ll cover. A brief explanation first: we’ve personally recruited the speakers, which is why it has been a slow process to finalize and get abstracts on the [...]

Using Flexviews – part one, introduction to materialized views

If you know me, then you probably have heard of Flexviews. If not, then it might not be familiar to you. I’m giving a talk on it at the MySQL 2011 CE, and I figured I should blog about it before then. For those unfamiliar, Flexviews enables you to create and maintain incrementally refreshable materialized [...]

Spreading .ibd files across multiple disks; the optimization that isn’t

Inspired by Baron’s earlier post, here is one I hear quite frequently – “If you enable innodb_file_per_table, each table is it’s own .ibd file.  You can then relocate the heavy hit tables to a different location and create symlinks to the original location.” There are a few things wrong with this advice:

Sharing an auto_increment value across multiple MySQL tables (revisited)

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Sharing an auto_increment value across multiple MySQL tables. In the comments, a few people wrote in to suggest alternative ways of implementing this.  I just got around to benchmarking those alternatives today across two large EC2 machines:

Converting Character Sets

The web is going the way of utf8.  Drizzle has chosen it as the default character set, most back-ends to websites use it to store text data, and those who are still using latin1 have begun to migrate their databases to utf8.  Googling for “mysql convert charset to utf8″ results in a plethora of sites, [...]

When would you use SAN with MySQL ?

One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?

Picking datatype for STATUS fields

Quite commonly in the applications you would need to use some kind of “status” field – status of order – “new”, “confirmed”, “in production”, “shipped” status of job, message etc. People use variety of ways to handle them often without giving enough thought to the choice which can cause problems later. Perhaps worst, though quite [...]

Recovering Innodb table Corruption

Assume you’re running MySQL with Innodb tables and you’ve got crappy hardware, driver bug, kernel bug, unlucky power failure or some rare MySQL bug and some pages in Innodb tablespace got corrupted. In such cases Innodb will typically print something like this: InnoDB: Database page corruption on disk or a failed InnoDB: file read of [...]