May 18, 2013

MySQL Wish for 2013 – Better Memory Accounting

With Performance Schema improvements in MySQL 5.6 I think we’re in the good shape with insight on what is causing performance bottlenecks as well as where CPU resources are spent. (Performance Schema does not accounts CPU usage directly but it is something which can be relatively easily derived from wait and stage information). Where we’re [...]

Hidden columns of query_review_history table

You can use pt-query-digest to process a MySQL slow query log and store historical values for review trend analysis into query_review_history table. According to its official documentation you can populate many columns in that table but there are other important ones such as ‘user’, ‘host’, ‘db’ which are not included by default. I will explain [...]

Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields

Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]

SELECT UNION Results INTO OUTFILE

Here’s a quick tip I know some of us has overlooked at some point. When doing SELECT … UNION SELECT, where do you put the the INTO OUTFILE clause? On the first SELECT, on the last or somewhere else? The manual has the answer here, to quote: Only the last SELECT statement can use INTO [...]

A workaround for the performance problems of TEMPTABLE views

MySQL supports two different algorithms for views: the MERGE algorithm and the TEMPTABLE algorithm. These two algorithms differ greatly. A view which uses the MERGE algorithm can merge filter conditions into the view query itself. This has significant performance advantages over TEMPTABLE views. A view which uses the TEMPTABLE algorithm will have to compute the [...]

Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio

I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]

Air traffic queries in InfiniDB: early alpha

As Calpont announced availability of InfiniDB I surely couldn’t miss a chance to compare it with previously tested databases in the same environment. See my previous posts on this topic: Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB Air traffic queries in LucidDB I could not run all queries against InfiniDB and I met some [...]

Why InnoDB index cardinality varies strangely

This is a very old draft, from early 2007 in fact. At that time I started to look into something interesting with the index cardinality statistics reported by InnoDB tables. The cardinality varies because it’s derived from estimates, and I know a decent amount about that. The interesting thing I wanted to look into was [...]

XtraDB: The Top 10 enhancements

Note: This post is part 2 of 4 on building our training workshop. Last week I talked about why you don’t want to shard. This week I’m following up with the top 10 enhancements that XtraDB has over the built-in InnoDB included in MySQL 5.0 and 5.1.  Building this list was not really a scientific [...]

MySQL Optimizer team comments on TPC-H Results

Yesterday I had a chance to speak to Igor – head of MySQL optimizer team and Timur – both of them expressed concern with TPC-H run results I posted and notes about little gains in MySQL 6.0. Do not get this post wrong. I’m not saying MySQL 6.0 SubQuery optimizations are non existent or priorities [...]