Today I was looking at the ALTER TABLE performance with fast index creation and without it with different buffer pool sizes. Results are pretty interesting. I used modified Sysbench table for these tests because original table as initially created only has index on column K which initially contains only zeros, which means index is very [...]
Improved InnoDB fast index creation
One of the serious limitations in the fast index creation feature introduced in the InnoDB plugin is that it only works when indexes are explicitly created using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. Peter has already blogged about it before, here I’ll just briefly reiterate other cases that might benefit from that feature: when ALTER TABLE [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]
PROCEDURE ANALYSE
Quite common task during schema review is to find the optimal data type for the column value – for example column is defined as INT but is it really needed or may be SMALLINT or even TINYINT will do instead. Does it contain any NULLs or it can be defined NOT NULL which reduces space [...]
AUTO_INCREMENT and MERGE TABLES
How would you expect AUTO_INCREMENT to work with MERGE tables ? Assuming INSERT_METHOD=LAST is used I would expect it to work same as in case insertion happens to the last table… which does not seems to be the case. Alternatively I would expect AUTO_INCREMENT to be based off the maximum value across all tables, respecting [...]
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 [...]

