This weekend we’re hearing great news from Michael “Monty” Widenius – one of the Fathers of MySQL. Monty finally found a time to create his own blog with very descriptive name Monty Says. At the same time Monty finally announces Maria – the MyISAM successor storage engine he has been working for last few years. [...]
MyISAM Scalability and Innodb, Falcon Benchmarks
We many times wrote about InnoDB scalability problems, this time We are faced with one for MyISAM tables. We saw that several times in synthetic benchmarks but never in production, that’s why we did not escalate MyISAM scalability question. This time working on the customer system we figured out that box with 1 CPU Core [...]
Using VIEW to reduce number of tables used
Many Open Source software solutions use database per user (or set of tables per user) which starts to cause problems if it is used on massive scale (blog hosting, forum hosting etc), resulting of hundreds of thousands if not millions of tables per server which can become really inefficient. It is especially inefficient with Innodb [...]
Query Profiling with MySQL: Bypassing caches
Quite frequently I run into question like this “I’m using SQL_NO_CACHE but my query is still much faster second time I run it, why is that ? The answer to this question is simple – because SQL_NO_CACHE only bypasses query cache but it has no change on other caches, which are MySQL Caches – Innodb [...]
How much overhead is caused by on disk temporary tables
As you might know while running GROUP BY and some other kinds of queries MySQL needs to create temporary tables, which can be created in memory, using MEMORY storage engine or can be created on disk as MYISAM tables. Which one will be used depends on the allowed tmp_table_size and also by the data which [...]
To UUID or not to UUID ?
Brian recently posted an article comparing UUID and auto_increment primary keys, basically advertising to use UUID instead of primary keys. I wanted to clarify this a bit as I’ve seen it being problems in so many cases. First lets look at the benchmark – we do not have full schema specified in the article itself [...]
Falcon Storage Engine Design Review
Now as new MySQL Storage engine – Falcon is public I can write down my thought about its design, which I previously should have kept private as I partially got them while working for MySQL. These thought base on my understanding, reading docs, speaking to Jim, Monty, Arjen and other people so I might miss [...]
InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks – part 1
Several days ago MySQL AB made new storage engine Falcon available for wide auditory. We cannot miss this event and executed several benchmarks to see how Falcon performs in comparison to InnoDB and MyISAM. The second goal of benchmark was a popular myth that MyISAM is faster than InnoDB in reads, as InnoDB is transactional, [...]
What to tune in MySQL Server after installation
My favorite question during Interview for people to work as MySQL DBAs or be involved with MySQL Performance in some way is to ask them what should be tuned in MySQL Server straight after installation, assuming it was installed with default settings. I’m surprised how many people fail to provide any reasonable answer to this [...]
InnoDB thread concurrency
InnoDB has a mechanism to regulate count of threads working inside InnoDB. innodb_thread_concurrency is variable which set this count, and there are two friendly variables innodb_thread_sleep_delay and innodb_concurrency_tickets. I’ll try to explain how it works. MySQL has pluginable architecture which divides work between mysql common code (parser, optimizer) and storage engine. From storage engine’s point [...]

