May 18, 2013

Connecting orphaned .ibd files

There are two ways InnoDB can organize tablespaces. First is when all data, indexes and system buffers are stored in a single tablespace. This is typicaly one or several ibdata files. A well known innodb_file_per_table option brings the second one. Tables and system areas are split into different files. Usually system tablespace is located in [...]

Shard-Query EC2 images available

Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]

Innodb row size limitation

I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.

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 [...]

Debugging problems with row based replication

MySQL 5.1 introduces row based binary logging. In fact, the default binary logging format in GA versions of MySQL 5.1 is ‘MIXED’ STATEMENT*;   The binlog_format  variable can still be changed per sessions which means it is possible that some of your binary log entries will be written in a row-based fashion instead of the [...]

SSD, XFS, LVM, fsync, write cache, barrier and lost transactions

We finally managed to get Intel X25-E SSD drive into our lab. I attached it to our Dell PowerEdge R900. The story making it running is worth separate mentioning – along with Intel X25-E I got HighPoint 2300 controller and CentOS 5.2 just could not start with two RAID controllers (Perc/6i and HighPoint 2300). The [...]

How much space does empty Innodb table take ?

How much space would empty MyISAM table take ? Probably 8K for .frm file, 1KB for .MYI file and 0 for MYD file. .MYI file can be larger if you have many indexes. How much space will Innodb take:

Efficient Boolean value storage for Innodb Tables

Sometimes you have the task of storing multiple of boolean values (yes/now or something similar) in the table and if you get many columns and many rows you may want to store them as efficient way as possible. For MyISAM tables you could use BIT(1) fields which get combined together for efficient storage:

Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?

Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]

MySQL Quality of old and new features

Recent couple of days our team was pointed to number of bugs in MySQL 5.0 which again seriously shakes the confidence in both MySQL Quality Control and bug fix promptness. Let me just take couple of bugs as examples: Triggers broken with auto-increment columns for Innodb tables (bug 26316). As you can see this bug [...]