May 20, 2013

Using MMM to ALTER huge tables

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 [...]

No more MySQL Crash Safe Replication in 5.0 ?

As you might know even if you’re only using Innodb tables your replication is not completely crash safe – if Slave MySQL Server crashes/power goes down it is likely for relay logs to run out of sync (they are not synced to the disk) plus position on the master which slave remembers becomes stale. During [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

GROUP_CONCAT useful GROUP BY extension

MySQL has useful extention to the GROUP BY operation: function GROUP_CONCAT: GROUP_CONCAT(expr) – This function returns a string result with the concatenated non-NULL values from a group. Where it can be useful?

Cache Performance Comparison

Jay Pipes continues cache experiements and has compared performance of MySQL Query Cache and File Cache. Jay uses Apache Benchmark to compare full full stack, cached or not which is realistic but could draw missleading picture as contribution of different components may be different depending on your unique applications. For example for application containing a [...]

Handling big result sets

Sometime it is needed to handle a lot of rows on client side. Usual way is send query via mysql_query and than handle the result in loop mysql_fetch_array (here I use PHP functions but they are common or similar for all APIs, including C). Consider table: