May 23, 2013

Thinking about running OPTIMIZE on your Innodb Table ? Stop!

Innodb/XtraDB tables do benefit from being reorganized often. You can get data physically laid out in primary key order as well as get better feel for primary key and index pages and so using less space, it is just OPTIMIZE TABLE might not be best way to do it. If you’re running Innodb Plugin on [...]

Impact of the sort buffer size in MySQL

The parameter sort_buffer_size is one the MySQL parameters that is far from obvious to adjust. It is a per session buffer that is allocated every time it is needed. The problem with the sort buffer comes from the way Linux allocates memory. Monty Taylor (here) have described the underlying issue in detail, but basically above [...]

Tuning InnoDB Concurrency Tickets

InnoDB has an oft-unused parameter innodb_concurrency_tickets that seems widely misunderstood. From the docs: “The number of threads that can enter InnoDB concurrently is determined by the innodb_thread_concurrency variable. A thread is placed in a queue when it tries to enter InnoDB if the number of threads has already reached the concurrency limit. When a thread [...]

Extending Index for Innodb tables can hurt performance in a surprising way

One schema optimization we often do is extending index when there are queries which can use more key part. Typically this is safe operation, unless index length increases dramatically queries which can use index can also use prefix of the new index are they ? It turns there are special cases when this is not [...]

mysql_upgrade and Innodb Tables

Upgrading from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1 or Percona Server 5.1 you may run into issues with mysql_upgrade – it will identify some tables to be upgraded and will attempt to run REPAIR TABLE for them. This will fail with “The storage engine for the table doesn’t support repair” error message. This seems to confuse [...]

InnoDB: look after fragmentation

One problem made me puzzled for couple hours, but it was really interesting to figure out what’s going on. So let me introduce problem at first. The table is

Table has 11864696 rows and takes Data_length: 698,351,616 bytes on disk The problem is that after restoring table from mysqldump, the query that scans data [...]

How (not) to find unused indexes

I’ve seen a few people link to an INFORMATION_SCHEMA query to be able to find any indexes that have low cardinality, in an effort to find out what indexes should be removed.  This method is flawed – here’s the first reason why:

The cardinality of status index is woeful, but provided that the application [...]

Copying InnoDB tables between servers

The feature I announced some time ago http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/06/08/impossible-possible-moving-innodb-tables-between-servers/ is now available in our latest releases of XtraBackup 0.8.1 and XtraDB-6. Now I am going to show how to use it (the video will be also available on percona.tv). Let’s take tpcc schema and running standard MySQL ® 5.0.83, and assume we want to copy order_line [...]

Slow DROP TABLE

It is a known fact that ext3 is not the most efficient file system out there and for example file removals can be painfully slow and cause a lot of random I/O. However, as it turns out, it can sometimes have a much more severe impact on the MySQL performance that it would seem. When [...]

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, [...]