I do not know if it is because we’re hosting a free webinar on migrating MyISAM to Innodb or some other reason but recently I see a lot of questions about migration from MyISAM to Innodb. Webinar will cover the process in a lot more details though I would like to go over basics in [...]
Beware of MyISAM Key Cache mutex contention
August 12, 2008 By 10 Comments
Today I was working with the client loading data to MyISAM tables at very high rate. Hundreds of millions rows are loaded daily into single MySQL instance with bursts up to 100K of records/sec which need to be inserted (in the table with few indexes). It was good not all records had to go to [...]
Picking datatype for STATUS fields
August 9, 2008 By 24 Comments
Quite commonly in the applications you would need to use some kind of “status” field – status of order – “new”, “confirmed”, “in production”, “shipped” status of job, message etc. People use variety of ways to handle them often without giving enough thought to the choice which can cause problems later. Perhaps worst, though quite [...]
Stored Function to generate Sequences
April 2, 2008 By 17 Comments
Today a customer asked me to help them to convert their sequence generation process to the stored procedure and even though I have already seen it somewhere I did not find it with two minutes of googling so I wrote a simple one myself and posting it here for public benefit or my later use
Using MMM to ALTER huge tables
March 27, 2008 By 11 Comments
Few months ago, I wrote about a faster way to do certain table modifications online. It works well when all you want is to remove auto_increment or change ENUM values. When it comes to changes that really require table to be rebuilt – adding/dropping columns or indexes, changing data type, converting data to different character [...]
Using VIEW to reduce number of tables used
September 28, 2007 By 12 Comments
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 [...]
What exactly is read_rnd_buffer_size
July 24, 2007 By 4 Comments
Looking for documentation for read_rnd_buffer_size you would find descriptions such as “The read_rnd_buffer_size is used after a sort, when reading rows in sorted order. If you use many queries with ORDER BY, upping this can improve performance” which is cool but it does not really tell you how exactly read_rnd_buffer_size works as well as which [...]
Implementing efficient counters with MySQL
July 1, 2007 By 16 Comments
On many web sites you would see a counter how many time given object – blog post, forum thread, image, movie etc was viewed. This is sometimes handy feature but it can be rather expensive from performance point of view. The nasty thing with counters as they are implemented the most trivial way – they [...]
Merge Tables Gotcha
May 9, 2007 By 4 Comments
I had the interesting customer case today which made me to do a bit research on the problem. You can create merge table over MyISAM tables which contain primary key and global uniqueness would not be enforced in this case, this is as far as most people will think about it. In fact however it [...]
MySQL automatic data truncation can backfire
January 9, 2007 By 10 Comments
I had a fun case today. There is set of cache tables which cache certain content in MyISAM tables and queries for these tables such as:
1 | select data from cache0003 where `key`=2342526263 and real_key='cp_140797_6460aad5d2e50d3e859e8649007686ac'; |
The “key” is CRC32 of the real key which is used to keep index size as small as possible so if we have a cache miss we can [...]
