May 23, 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

10+ Ways to Crash or Overload MySQL

People are sometimes contacting me and asking about bugs like this which provide a trivial way to crash MySQL to the user with basic privileges and asking me what to do. My answer to them is – there is nothing new to it and they just sit should back and relax Really – there are [...]

MySQL VIEW as performance troublemaker

I start to see applications being built utilizing VIEWs functionality which appeared in MySQL 5.0 and quite frequently VIEWs are used to help in writing the queries – to keep queries simple without really thinking how it affects server performance. Even worse than that – looking at the short table which just gets single row [...]

Derived Tables and Views Performance

Starting MySQL 4.1, MySQL had support for what is called derived tables, inline views or basically subselects in the from clause. In MySQL 5.0 support for views was added. These features are quite related to each other but how do they compare in terms of performance ?