Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]
Quickly finding unused indexes (and estimating their size)
December 5, 2012 By 2 Comments
I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding. They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed. Collecting data It’s [...]
Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do
November 1, 2012 By 1 Comment
pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex. Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities. Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs. The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]
Timezone and pt-table-checksum
September 25, 2012 By 1 Comment
I recently worked through an issue with a client trying to detect data drift across some servers that were located in different timezones. Unfortunately, several of the tables had timestamp fields and were set to a default value of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. From the manual, here is how MySQL handles timezone locality with timestamp fields: Values for TIMESTAMP columns are [...]
How to obtain the “LES” (Last Executed Statement) from an Optimized Core Dump?
September 9, 2012 By 9 Comments
Ever ran into a situation where you saw “some important variable you really needed to know about=<optimized out>” while debugging?
Here’s a quick way to Foresee if Replication Slave is ever going to catch up and When!
August 29, 2012 By 11 Comments
If you ever had a replication slave that is severely behind, you probably noticed that it’s not catching up with a busy master at a steady pace. Instead, the “Seconds behind master” is going up and down so you can’t really tell whether the replica is catching up or not by looking at just few [...]
Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance
July 5, 2012 By 11 Comments
MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
Find unused indexes
June 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]
Comparing Percona XtraDB Cluster with Semi-Sync replication Cross-WAN
June 14, 2012 By 7 Comments
I have a customer who is considering Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a two colo WAN environment. They wanted me to do a test comparing PXC against semi-synchronous replication to see how they stack up against each other. Test Environment The test environment included AWS EC2 nodes in US-East and US-West (Oregon). The ping RTT latency [...]
How expensive is USER_STATISTICS?
June 2, 2012 By 14 Comments
One of our customers asked me whether it’s safe to enable the so-called USER_STATISTICS features of Percona Server in a heavy-use production server with many tens of thousands of tables. If you’re not familiar with this feature, it creates some new INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables that add counters for activity on users, hosts, tables, indexes, and more. [...]
