May 23, 2013

Adventures in archiving

One of our Remote DBA service clients recently had an issue with size on disk for a particular table; in short this table was some 25 million rows of application audit data with an on disk size of 345GB recorded solely for the purposes of debugging which may or may not occur. Faced with the task of [...]

Recovery after DROP & CREATE

In a very popular data loss scenario a table is dropped and empty one is created with the same name. This is because  mysqldump in many cases generates the “DROP TABLE” instruction before the “CREATE TABLE”:

If there were no subsequent CREATE TABLE the recovery would be trivial. Index_id of the PRIMARY index of [...]

MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup

I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]

Dynamic row format for MEMORY tables

The latest Percona Server release has one new feature: now MEMORY tables can have BLOB and TEXT columns, and VARCHAR columns will not waste space due to implicit extension to CHAR.

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

Using delayed JOIN to optimize count(*) and LIMIT queries

In many Search/Browse applications you would see main (fact) table which contains search fields and dimension tables which contain more information about facts and which need to be joined to get query result. If you’re executing count(*) queries for such result sets MySQL will perform the join even if you use LEFT JOIN so it [...]