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 [...]
Flexviews – part 3 – improving query performance using materialized views
April 4, 2011 By 20 Comments
Combating “data drift” In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually [...]
Worse than DDOS
August 18, 2008 By 5 Comments
Today I worked on rather interesting customer problem. Site was subject what was considered DDOS and solution was implemented to protect from it. However in addition to banning the intruders IPs it banned IPs of web services which were very actively used by the application which caused even worse problems by consuming all apache slots [...]
Using flow control functions for performance monitoring queries
May 24, 2008 By 12 Comments
I’m not big fan on flow control functions like IF or CASE used in MySQL Queries as they are often abused used to create queries which are poorly readable as well as can hardly be optimized well by MySQL Optimizer. One way I find IF statement very useful is computing multiple aggregates over different set [...]
MVCC: Transaction IDs, Log Sequence numbers and Snapshots
December 19, 2007 By 3 Comments
MySQL Storage Engines implementing Multi Version Concurrency Control have several internal identifiers related to MVCC. I see a lot of people being confused what they are and why they are needed so I decided to take a time to explain it a bit. This is general explanation, it does not corresponds to Innodb in particular [...]
Filtered MySQL Replication
November 7, 2007 By 8 Comments
To get this straight – I’m not a big fan of filtered or partial MySQL Replication (as of version MySQL 5.0) – there is enough gotchas with replication itself and getting things right with filtering can get quite bumpy road. In some applications however it is very helpful so lets see what one should do [...]
MySQL Query Cache
July 27, 2006 By 70 Comments
MySQL has a great feature called “Query Cache” which is quite helpful for MySQL Performance optimization tasks but there are number of things you need to know. First let me clarify what MySQL Query Cache is – I’ve seen number of people being confused, thinking MySQL Query Cache is the same as Oracle Query Cache [...]
Operation Systems do not provide good IO interface for Database Servers
May 11, 2006 By 2 Comments
Thinking more about the problems I wrote about yesterday I had a question why so ugly workaround and guesses or manual configuration is needed ? The answer seems to be Operation Interfaces just do not provide IO interface which is good enough. The big missing piece is priority. There are process and threads priorities in [...]
